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In Point of Fact |
from NewsLink, Vol. 2, No. 3, Spring 1998
The count for education reform: Strike three!
The sheer volume of the [Massachusetts] legislature's $5 billion commitment in the Education Reform Act of 1993 was testament to the severe alarm among the political and business classes over the public schools' inability to produce passably literate graduates. Five years and nearly $2 billion in new spending later, math and reading scores have barely budged.
Jon Keller, Boston, May 1998.So much for federal bean-counting.
The federal government last fiscal year improperly recorded more than $100 billion worth of transactions, and could not find many millions of dollars' worth of military and civilian equipment and property, a series of audits showed yesterday. A sampling of the missing items the General Accounting Office and federal agencies found are two $4 million Navy engines for fighter aircraft, two large Navy tugboats costing $875,000 each and a $1 million Army missile launcher.
Richard Powelson, Reuters, April 1, 1998.Privatization versus political reality.
The privatization movement appears to have lost some momentum in the United States over the 1990s. Although local governments continue to look for ways to deliver services more efficiently by using private contractors, the pace at which they are issuing contracts has slowed. . . . In part, the trends may reflect political realities. Public employees naturally are concerned about losing their jobs, and they constitute a sizable share of the electorate.
Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, New England Economic Review, January/February 1998.Note to Japan: Real tax cuts may help.
Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto's highly touted $30 billion tax cut amounts to only $340 in savings this year and next for the average household--not enough, economists say, to reverse Japan's economic slide. . . . The proposal calls for the tax cuts over the next two years as part of $76 billion that would be pumped into the economy. "I think that's peanuts," Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Norwest Corp. in Minneapolis, said. "Consumers are likely to save rather than spend it because of pessimism" about the economy.
Associated Press, April 10, 1998.File under: "They all do it."
Republican Governors like California's Pete Wilson, Texas's George W. Bush and Michigan's John Engler talk tough when it comes to cutting back bureaucracy. But while they talk, they keep hiring. In the mid-1990s, as the words "freeze," "shrink," "cap" and "cut" have become staples of the executive lexicon, state government employment has continued to go up almost everywhere. Nationally, in the years from 1990 to 1996, it increased by 5%. Local governments have been staffing up at twice the speed of state government. In fact, local and state government both win a place on the Bureau of Labor Statistics top-10 list of growth industries in the 1990s . . . accounting for more than one-seventh of all the new jobs in the U.S. non-farm economy.
Jonathan Walters, Governing, February 1998.Seniors get stung.
When Marshfield, MA seniors found out they could knock $500 off their property tax bills by working 100 hours at Town Hall, the retirees jumped at the chance. Yet no sooner had the seniors sealed their last envelope than they found the IRS standing over them demanding its cut.
Robin Washington, Boston Herald, May 4, 1998.
NewsLink is the quarterly newsletter of the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research at Suffolk University. © 1996-1998. All rights reserved.
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