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Keeping Free Marketers Current on Issues
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Empty Schools
 This week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel began running an excellent series on the taxpayer boondoggle known as the Neighborhood Schools Initiative.
The program, which was supposed to keep Milwaukee Public School students from being bused all over the city, has instead wasted over a hundred million dollars to build and maintain classrooms that will never be used by MPS schools.
Among the Journal Sentinel’s conclusions:
- State and local officials misjudged the willingness of parents to take their children off buses, despite overwhelming survey results that showed parents were happy with the way things were.
- The district relied on unrealistic predictions of a mass migration by MPS students back into neighborhood schools. The projections were so off-base that MPS officials couldn't foresee a steep enrollment plunge in the district's most overcrowded neighborhood.
- Politics and community pressure led to costly detours and questionable moves. In one case, the district dumped plans to expand one of its top-priority schools and instead spent $1.7 million to build classrooms for the school in a recreation center next door that had ties to state Sen. Gary George. The center went belly up amid criminal charges that helped send George to prison.
- Planners severely underestimated the appeal of private and charter schools in the neighborhoods where many of the construction projects were located. The growth of choice schools added to the district's miseries.
The program, which will cost taxpayers $175 million when the construction bonds are paid off, clearly ignored many of the inner city realities that occur any time government dumps a wheelbarrow of money in the inner city. In this case, corruption, waste and mismanagement became the cornerstone of the Neighborhood Schools program. The good news is taxpayers only have another 20 years to pay off the debt issued to fund this colossal mistake.
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Democrats Breaking Wind
 Suppose, for a moment, that you are the only person in America that can understand the Democrats’ energy plan. Let’s say you can explain how we can be less dependent on foreign oil by continuing to ban drilling for our own domestic oil.
Let’s say you honestly believe the answer to our energy crisis is inflating our tires. Perhaps you can explain how making energy more expensive by banning coal and nuclear power plants in Wisconsin is going to help consumers and the economy.
This week, the Wall Street Journal pointed out another energy contradiction you can use to amuse thinking people by trying to explain it. A television ad supporting Barack Obama implies he’s going to lessen our independence on foreign oil by cheerleading for wind energy. Yet, whenever efforts to build more windmills are offered, it’s the environmentalists that block implementation.
Environmentalists, who say they want clean energy, oppose windmills for two main reasons. First, they don’t approve of the aesthetic degradation caused by the large windmill blades. In other words, they don’t want to look at them. Second, they oppose the means by which the electricity would actually be transmitted to consumers; namely, more power lines.
In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."
And thus, the incoherent Democratic energy policy moves on – caught hopelessly between promising energy independence and actually implementing it.
Vote Fraud
 Last week’s update detailed the charges of vote fraud brought against a group that calls itself ACORN. According to the charges that have been forwarded on to the Milwaukee District Attorney, ACORN members filed hundreds of fraudulent voter registration cards in an attempt to get fake names on the voter rolls.
ACORN’s response? Well, they defend themselves by saying they just fired 12 people for turning in up to 300 fraudulent cards. So, their argument seems to be “well, plenty of people do it, but we usually catch them.” Naturally, the paper didn’t follow up with any of these workers who were supposedly fired, so we don’t know if it actually occurred.
Of course, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel defends all this criminality, continuing to argue that Wisconsin still doesn’t need a photo identification requirement to vote. The MJS editorial board continues to undermine the solid reporting of its news division, which has found thousands of instances of voter roll names that don’t exist. The only way to fix the problem is to match people up with the name they are using to vote – which would require some sort of identification.
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