Our weekly Top Five feature offers big stories or views from the past week with policy and legislative implications.
- Film incentives cost South Carolina, National Review, Aug. 10, 2016
In South Carolina, film incentives returned just 19 cents in taxes for each dollar paid out in rebates. That’s “a net loss in revenues equal to 81 percent of expenditures on rebates,” as the Tax Foundation pointed out. Maryland barely managed to recoup 6 cents on every dollar spent on its tax-incentive program for movie production.
2. How Obama helped a school in Dillon, The Hechinger Report via PBS Newshour, Aug. 10, 2016
Analyst Alan Richard offers a look at how President Barack Obama, who visited an old Dillon middle school when he was running for president in 2007, helped it in several ways. He says, also, that Obama has been late in addressing needs of poor, rural communities like Dillon. An excerpt:
“Once he became president, Obama made education, and narrowing the achievement gaps between poor students and their better-off peers, one of his major priorities. Nine years later, as he approaches the end of his second term, educators and kids in Dillon County say President Obama made good on many of his promises. Here, that came in the form of helping the town replace the decrepit J.V. Martin campus with an impressive new building. And his visits called more national and local attention to under-resourced, rural schools serving mostly minority populations.”
- College students face more than debt challenges, The Washington Post, Aug. 11, 2016
“A series of studies by Third Way, a think tank, show that many colleges and universities are leaving students with no better than a 50/50 chance of graduating or finding work that pays more than what someone with a high-school diploma can expect to earn. The findings build on a body of research advocating for greater focus on college completion, rather than just access to and affordability of higher education.”
- Paying teachers more won’t stop them from quitting, Emily Deruy in The Atlantic, Aug. 11, 2016
“In interviews with more than half a dozen former teachers, some of whom I tracked down via Twitter, a lack of support—from school and district administrators, lawmakers, and the community more broadly—came up most frequently as a rationale for leaving. Money, when it was a factor at all, was always a secondary reason. That’s not entirely surprising given that people rarely go into teaching for the money. Some see educating children as an act of service. Others stumble into the profession wide-eyed after college. Still others pursue a career in the classroom because it’s what their mothers did, and their grandmothers before that. But no one goes into teaching for the paycheck alone.”
- On the “national childishness” for not reforming government, George Will in The Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2016
This commentary on the lack of real fiscal conservatism in states uses Illinois as the example, but it applies to many states and the federal government. An excerpt:
“Illinois is a leading indicator of increasing national childishness — an unwillingness to will the means for the ends that it wills. Nationally, state and local governments’ pensions have somewhere between $1 trillion and $4 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities, depending on, among other things, assumptions about returns on pension funds’ investments. The Wall Street Journal reports that in 2001, the 20-year median return was 12.3 percent and every percentage-point decline in returns increases liabilities by 12 percent.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Thanks this week to Virginia Reader Dale Rhodes for suggesting the above reads.
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