In Baltimore recently there were 13 public high schools where not one student was performing at grade level in reading. Not one. Those schools had valedictorians that couldn't read at the 12th grade level. Think about that. Now, imagine you're a low-income parent living in a neighborhood 'served' by one of those 13 public high schools... What do you do? Do you send your child to the (arguably) failing public high school or do you pray you might get a voucher to put your child in a private school or maybe a charter school?

It's easy to sit back and argue vouchers don't work when you look at sweeping statistics removed from personal experiences, but to those parents it's a real benefit.

I once heard a critic argue that on average, charter schools are about average to slightly above average compared to the public schools they 'compete' with. Thst sounds like there's no need for charter schools, right? Now take that very same argument and try to convince a parent of a student at one of the below-average schools and suddenly the argument that charter schools are only "average" becomes a ringing endorsement and something the parent desperately wants instead of their below-average school.

I earned a BA degree at a state college that lets students earn degrees based on life experience and class work collected from various institutions - personally I used college credits from three schools to earn my degree (most universities require two years enrollment to earn a degree) - but my graduation was contingent on having a 30 minute (recorded) discussion with a professor on a topic related to my degree program. I thought it was a great 'sanity check', preventing someone from skating by, school-hopping, and getting a degree without actually learning anything.

It's labor-intensive and opens the door for a lot of subjective issues (the professor doesn't like me, she's racist, etc), but it my situation it worked out well.

Because, presumably, you learned something in the process of getting "the magic piece of paper."

The premise in this article seems to be that the reason teachers assign the same homework to all 30 students in the math class is because she really needs to know the answers to the 25 random multiplication problems in the homework, and she figures that with 30 kids doing the same problem she can be sure of the answer... The teacher assigns homework to reinforce student learning, not to solve math problems.

This is nothing like the horse example in The Fine Summary - we don't breed children to put them in public schools to solve math problems for the teacher's benefit, we did breed horses to pull carts until the automobile came along.

Uh, what?

The War of the Worlds radio broadcast was at 8 PM Sunday night - what businesses closed early? What stock brokers were working at 8:00 PM? Etc...

Was there a great over-reaction to the broadcast? Absolutely, but it was broadcast at 8 PM EST.

Source: https://www.history.com/this-d...

Seriously? That's something people track? "Worst single day drop in nearly two weeks"?

You know what that means? Three weeks prior there was a worse single day drop. How do I know this, because if there wasn't the line would have read:

"triggering the S&P 500's worst single-day drop in nearly three weeks on Monday"

What a stupid non-issue.

So your argument is they are firing IT workers so they can automate return processing of returns?

WTF? How do you imagine returns are processed? Old men with green visors and sleeve protectors plowing through mountains of paper returns?

Wouldn't they need MORE it workers (not fewer) to automate return processing?

What tapes? You do know the Steele Dossier is all made up, right? The Obama FBI offered Steele a $1 Million payment if he could prove the things in his Dossier, and oddly, the former British spy couldn't prove any of it?

Trump doubled the standard deduction in his first term (part of the "tax break for millionaires and billionaires"), then when Biden got into office he left the increased standard deduction in place, but when Trump returned to office Democrats fought Trump trying to make the doubled standard deduction permanent (again, labeling it a "tax cut for millionaires and billionaires")

To be clear, you contend that MN is on the forefront of fighting waste, fraud, and abuse? Really?

Somehow the fraudsters in MN were able to bilk the federal gov't for literal billions of dollars for a number of years and only recently started prosecuting the offenders, and that somehow proves MN is on top of things?

Also, I notice you only mention one convicted fraudster, a white woman. Of the 80+ convictions secured already, wasn't there only ONE white person convicted? It's just a coincidence all the rest were largely from one ethnic community, a community that represents a large voting bloc in MN?

Wow, too bad more states can't be as great as MN!

Changes to the tax code means changing the out-dated COBOL systems that process the returns. It really isn't as trivial as you might guess.

No, you're trying too hard. You exempt staples from sales tax, more broadly and generally than under current sales tax schemes.

For example, all unprepared food items are tax exempt, period. If you buy a rotisserie chicken or a prepared entree at the grocery store, maybe there's a tax, but not on uncooked chickens, etc. clothing, toiletries, and medical items are also tax exempt. Maybe clothes, up to a per-item limit, say, $100 per item with items under that amount tax-exempt, above that limit there's a tax applied.

You can't start mailing everyone a monthly check to reimburse estimated expenditures, that just insane and a recipe for fraud.

There are states without sales taxes, and states without income taxes, but every state has one or the other.

So businesses could no longer deduct losses or investments in research? Families couldn't deduct home mortgage interest, medical expenses, stock market losses, etc?

Really? Tell me how you'll get that approved by elected politicians?

Here's a mental exercise for you:

Imagine the IRS had a mechanism that was able to root out and deny fraudulent tax returns BUT it had a 0.01% error rate, meaning one out of every 10,000 returns would be erroneously rejected. Now, imagine a return filled out by poor people, people of color, or women were statistically more likely to be in that wrongly-rejected group of returns.

Would elected officials understand that's a cost of doing this type of work, or would they publicly rail about the racist IRS?

Politicians may not intentionally design federal programs to be easily abused, but they become incensed and very defensive when anyone takes steps to prosecute people defrauding the government if they happen to be members of certain ethnic groups (Somali childcare, Autisim clinics, underprivileged child nutrition programs, for example) are implicated.

Detecting fraud is not always rewarded in the federal or state government.

We have an ancient code base for the IRS for the same reason the FBI still has an ancient IT infrastructure and the Air Traffic Controllers are relying on vacuum tube mainframes - the government SUCKS at large-scale system upgrades/rewrites.

IT workers aren't auditors, and auditors aren't IT workers, two wildly different skill sets.