Economic Illiteracy
Basic knowledge of Smith and Friedman should be required for graduation from elementary school.
If you want to see someone bring a knife to a gun fight Friedman and Donahue on Capitalism and Greed.
So Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, the man who conceived the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3000 Americans, is eligible for a swine flu vaccination. But Kristin Bencik, a pediatrician working overtime to treat kids suspected of having swine flu, has chosen to forego a shot so that she is not taking one away from one of her vulnerable patients. And she is really a "higher risk" case -- she's pregnant.
It's worth wondering what effect all of this will have on efforts by Democrats to pass a $1 trillion overhaul of the US health care system.
We thought cash for clunkers was the ultimate waste of taxpayer money, but as usual we were too optimistic. Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama's stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy that great necessity of modern life, the golf cart.
Join General Washinton as he twitters during the Delware crossing and on to the battle of Trenton.
Where you going to go?
Neighboring Rates for Substitute Teachers
Fleetwood $90.00
Kutztown $100.00
Oley $97.00
East Penn, Parkland $100+
Brandywine Heights $85
By having a lower rate the district saves even more. If the qualified subs go elsewhere and nobody can be found the cost is $0.00. .
No house, now credit, no problem as long as you have a 4 year old that hasn't maxed out their credit cards.
They may not be able to cross the street on their own or color within the lines, but many kids qualified for the first-time homebuyer credit.
Due to a loophole and some odd reporting criteria, children as young as 4 received the first-time homebuyer credit that Congress passed last year, according to PoliticsDaily.com. The credit is worth $8,000 and was created to encourage first-time buyers to purchase a home.
House panel learns that a 4-year-old got the first-time homebuyer credit.
These are the same people that want to be in control of our health.
This s
ite far from being a hack site as some detractors have called it has been awarded an Official Obama News Organization and has joined the State Run Media. There will be no further links from any of the faux news organizations. Now lets see you try making disparaging comments from Gitmo. We now know who and where you are. Keep hoping for change.
Kathleen Parker on the new force behind legalizing marijuana, conservative moms.
There's nothing like imagining one's own children as "criminals" to put irrational laws in perspective.
Can Martha Stewart be far behind with a WalMart line of designer bongs?
Kathleen Parker - Today's marijuana lobby is more hockey mom than hippie - washingtonpost.com.
Nice article in today's Reading Eagle
Teachers have wrestled with ways to get kids excited about learning for as long as there have been schools.
At Longswamp Elementary School, they've come up with a least a temporary answer - let 'em build race cars.
The kids in Judi Repko's third-grade class let out a collective "oooh" Tuesday upon learning they would get to assemble their own race cars from LEGO blocks, then actually race them.
LEGO race cars fuel learning at Longswamp Elementary School.
The cost of adding a student to the cyber program operated by the Brandywine Heights district is less than $3,000 ("Some Berks districts bringing public schools home," Reading Eagle, Oct. 4). As the program grows, that incremental cost will go down. The actual cost to add a student at a cyber charter school is much less since the fixed costs are spread over the thousands of students served.
There has been a lot of talk on the government policies that create "Green Jobs". Sounds all warm and fuzzy but thus top down approach has been done already in Spain and other parts of Europe. For every 4 jobs created the economy lost 9 jobs in other sectors.
The study calculates that since 2000 Spain spent €571,138 to create each “green job”, including subsidies of more than €1 million per wind industry job.
Marginal Revolution: Green jobs.
If Green Jobs is the goal that could easily be done overnight by outlawing tractors and other CO2 belching farm machinery. The employees of John Deere may not be too happy but they would be needed as field hands or raising horses and mules.
This fallacy is not even new. When a government starts trying to control the economy you end up with the Swiftian “Petitions From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting” for the Government to limit natural light. From the 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat
Rush Limbaugh is so “divisive” that to get him fired leftie agitators have to invent racist soundbites to put in his mouth.
But the White House communications director is so un-divisive that she can be invited along to recommend Chairman Mao as a role model for America’s young.
From my unscientific survey, U.S. school students are all but entirely unaware of Mao Tse-Tung, and the few that aren’t know him mainly as a T-shirt graphic or “agrarian reformer.” What else did he do? Here, from Jonathan Fenby’s book Modern China, is the great man in a nutshell:
“Mao’s responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin.”
Hey, that’s pretty impressive when they can’t get your big final-score death toll nailed down to closer than 30 million.
A Tale of Two Soundbites by Mark Steyn on National Review Online
Hard to grasp 40 million people but that would be the same as killing every resident in Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Maine, Nebraska, West Virginia, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Iowa Connecticut and Oklahoma. Then have a margin of error greater then killing everyone in Pennsylvania and Illinois. That is the person who has the honor of working in the White House puts up as a role model to High School students.
Since girl soccer is moving to fall in a couple of years the Brandywine Board worked out a deal with the Lehigh Velodrome to lease some of their track bikes over the winter months for Indoor Cycling a sport whose time has come.
Can Rush buy the St Louis Rams if he gets Roman Polanski to front the deal?
Monday Morning Quarter-backtrack - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online.
Could time travel from the past sabotaging the Hadron collider?
A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.” - Niels Bohr
NASHVILLE (The Borowitz Report) - President Barack Obama stunned the country music world today by picking up its highest honor, Country Music Entertainer of the Year.
Mr. Obama was chosen unanimously, according to the Country Music Association, beating out such favorite as Carrie Underwood and Toby Keith.
In Nashville, country music insiders were shocked by Mr. Obama's selection, given that he has only been in office for eight months and during that time has yet to record a single country song.
But Mr. Obama was gracious in receiving the honor, saying that he was "honored and humbled" by the award before excusing himself to accept this year's Heisman Trophy.
A first grader is facing 45 days in reform school because administrators in a Delaware district subscribe to the superstition that a Policy protects children. Zero tolerance is nothing more than zero intelligence use of authority.
According to a new study, kids who eat too many treats at a young age risk becoming violent in adulthood.
The research was led by Simon Moore, a senior lecturer in Violence and Society Research at Cardiff University in the U.K., who specializes in the study of vulnerable youngsters. Moore had been investigating the factors that lead children to commit serious crimes, when, during the course of his work, he discovered that "kids with the worst problems tend to be impulsive risk takers, and that these kids had terrible diets - breakfast was a Coke and a bag of chips," he says. …
Earlier this year, economist David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine, wrote on these pages that the 70-cent-an-hour increase in the minimum wage would cost some 300,000 jobs. Sure enough, the mandated increase to $7.25 took effect in July, and right on cue the August and September jobless numbers confirm the rapid disappearance of jobs for teenagers.
The September teen unemployment rate hit 25.9%, the highest rate since World War II and up from 23.8% in July. Some 330,000 teen jobs have vanished in two months. Hardest hit of all: black male teens, whose unemployment rate shot up to a catastrophic 50.4%. It was merely a terrible 39.2% in July
The minimum wage hike has driven the wages of teen employees down to $0.00
At this cafe, you get what the person before you ordered. The next person gets what you ordered.
Welcome to the Ogori cafe!
I hear a lot of chatter about the rich getting richer. That sort of talk is a generalization of course, since obviously there are rich people who get poorer, some go bankrupt, and a few do the full Madoff. But as generalizations go, it's true enough.
I wonder how people would feel if instead of saying "the rich are getting richer" we said "the smart are getting richer." Would it be just as true, as far as generalizations go, and would it make you feel the same when you heard it?
Capitalism rewards hard work, risk taking, luck, and intelligence. But are all of those elements equally important?
Recent stimulus money was used to update Brandywine voice mail system to a more efficient system developed in Australia. Current school issues seem to be the same across the globe.
The Brandywine Taxpayers Group recent newsletter stated that the cost for a Brandywine student was $16,385 while the cost of student at Kutztown University was only $10,000.
While some students with special needs are sent to other locations at a cost of $15,000 to $30,000, the effective tuition for a Brandywine student is $9,400. This is the cost we would normally charge an out of district student and what we are charged by organizations like charter and cyber schools. Before coming up with an inflammatory cost of a regular student by simply dividing,the budget has to be stripped of special education cost, the cost of students in custody and construction cost has to be allocated over the expected life span of the building along with other adjustments to find the true cost.
The $10,000 mentioned for a KU student is only the tuition charged to a Pennsylvania resident. Tuition in most schools and all public schools is only a fraction of the total cost of a college education. The school receives money from the state and federal governments along with private sources to make up the difference. The real cost at Kutztown University is reflected more in the out of state tuition close to $30,000.
A few facts and a calculator in the wrong hands can be a dangerous thing.
