The 180 on Parental Choice By Senator Warren

About ten years ago I read a very well done book by, then Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren entitled The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke” (2003) by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi.

Below is an excerpt from that book which makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, since the time she wrote it, now Senator Warren has discovered the money train provided by the teacher's unions. As a result she has completely reversed her opinion of parental choice in schools. There are only two possibilities here:

1. Being elected to office removes rational thinking from your skill set.

2. Senator Warren (who once claimed to have American Indian heritage in order to enhance her employment possibilities) has always been a hypocrite.

Not sure which is the more flattering choice.

Any policy that loosens the ironclad relationship between location-location-location and school-school-school would eliminate the need for parents to pay an inflated price for a home just because it happens to lie within the boundaries of a desirable school district.
A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly. A taxpayer-funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to all children. . . . Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.

We recognize that the term “voucher” has become a dirty word in many educational circles. The reason is straightforward: The current debate over vouchers is framed as a public-versus-private rift, with vouchers denounced for draining off much-needed funds from public schools. The fear is that partial-subsidy vouchers provide a boost so that better-off parents can opt out of a failing public school system, while the other children are left behind.
But the public-versus-private competition misses the central point. The problem is not vouchers; the problem is parental choice. Under current voucher schemes, children who do not use the vouchers are still assigned to public schools based on their zip codes. This means that in the overwhelming majority of cases, a bureaucrat picks the child’s school, not a parent. The only way for parents to exercise any choice is to buy a different home—which is exactly how the bidding wars started.
Short of buying a new home, parents currently have only one way to escape a failing public school: Send the kids to private school. But there is another alternative, one that would keep much-needed tax dollars inside the public school system while still reaping the advantages offered by a voucher program. Local governments could enact meaningful reform by enabling parents to choose from among all the public schools in a locale, with no presumptive assignment based on neighborhood. Under a public school voucher program, parents, not bureaucrats, would have the power to pick schools for their children—and to choose which schools would get their children’s vouchers.

Median HH Income is Stagnant, but NOT for the Reasons You've Been Told

Mark Perry  at U of Michigan created this very interesting chart. Yes, median household income has not been growing for the last 15 years. You've heard that. But real hourly compensation has been growing steadily. Mathematically this can only happen if the median number of hours worked per household fell. There are several possibilities which would contribute to this:

1. Employed people are working fewer hours. We know that Obamacare caused many jobs to become part-time rather than full time. People may also be voluntarily reducing

2. There are fewer people employed per household. We know that household size has been steadily decreasing for some time. If a working couple divorces, the number of hours worked per household (now 2 instead of 1) drops as does the medium income per household.

3. The percent of the workforce that is employed continues to drop year after year. That results in fewer hours worked per household.

The bottom line is that when the media and politicians shout that the "median household income is falling" it is not because people are being paid less to work. There is just a lot less work being done in the average household.