Personal Economics 101

The Texas Senate on Thursday approved a $500 million school choice bill mostly along party lines after hours of passionate debate. It will now head for consideration in the House, where members rejected similar proposals during the regular session. Senators passed Senate Bill 1 by a 18-13 vote, with one Republican joining all Democrats in voting against the measure. The bill will likely face steep resistance in the House, where Democratic members and many rural Republicans have vehemently opposed such proposals. School choice programs, also called education savings accounts or vouchers, use public money to help pay for a child’s private schooling. “We must recognize that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't fit the needs of our diverse student population,” said Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who authored SB 1 and estimated the proposal could serve about 60,000 students. Texas has about 5.5 million children in public schools. Public schools have failed the American people, especi...

In the race for Texas governor, Beto O'Rouke keeps claiming that he'll fully fund education. But it's already over-funded, and without the legislature, he can't do anything. Empty promises. Currently, more than $60 billion is spent on Texas education (not including universities). 

 This plan would actually benefit the wealthy more than the poor.  It might be the biggest giveaway in American history and goes much further than anything Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren have proposed. Biden now wants to cancel more than $1 trillion dollars in student loans – he's already let college graduates delay repayments for years. This plan makes suckers out of the millions of Americans who have felt honor bound to pay off their debts. Even more lavishly subsidizing higher education will only push tuition even higher and making the next round of student debt even higher. But who would ever pay off a student loan after this blanket forgiveness program. Who would benefit? The most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances found that only 22% of families had student loan debt and "student debt has consistently been disproportionately held by higher-income families." Canceling all student loans is supported by 19% of voters according to the latest poll – ...

  A client called one afternoon and said, “I need $50,000 out of my IRA account.” “Uh, ok. Why?” I responded. “To pay off my credit cards. The interest is killing me.” “Yeah, I get that. Why are your credit card debts so high?” “Well, I just don’t make enough money to pay for the things I need.” “Ever thought about getting another job or moving to a less expensive house?” “Nah, I like my job and house.” I fulfilled her request and a year later it repeated. Eventually, her nest egg was, well like Humpty Dumpty. Not exactly sure what she did after that. She never calls. I kind of feel lonely. Now, my wife and I use credit cards. She has a wallet full of them. Different ones for major companies we buy from. They give us discounts or we build points. But every month we pay off the balances. No carryover and no interest. Just convenience and rewards. The credit card companies have a name for people like us: “deadbeats”. No kidding. My wife was talking with a credit card service person r...

Teachers unions are angry about school choice. Of course they are, because they know they can't compete with private schools, and private schools are generally unionized, and don't generate funds for the unions. More money equals more power. It's not about the kids. It's about self-interest and power.  We are continually told that public schools are underfunded. We must pay more in taxes. This is hogwash. School funding is at an all-time high. More money goes to administration and reporting than education. This all began when the Federal government got involved, and the Department of Education was formed.  Don't buy into the left's mantra of more control of education. Parents are starting to fight back by insisting that they are heard and have input into their children's education, though the left believes the state should raise the children (like in Germany in the 1930s).  Just between 2002 and 2019, inflation-adjusted revenues grew by nearly 24%. Yet the r...

Learn from Victor Davis Hanson how the rights of the American citizen are under attack by a ruling class that seeks to make our government unaccountable to the people. You can enroll in this FREE online course, “American Citizenship and Its Decline,” today at: https://hillsdale.edu/citizen https://youtu.be/7GNl4bPHpX4

From " Outliers: The Story of Success " by Malcolm Gladwell.  Genius is not everything—emotional and practical intelligence are also critical to success The man who invented the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test was Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford. His area of expertise was quantifying intelligence. In the early 1920s, he decided to dedicate his life to the study of singularly gifted kids. After a thorough vetting process through several rounds of tests given to elementary students in California, Terman selected a group of 1,470 children who had done brilliantly on the tests. The average IQ among the children was 140, and some had IQs as high as 200. He affectionately referred to these children as the “Termites,” and he dedicated his life to tracking their progress and life events. IQ matters, clearly, but only up to a point. An IQ of 100 is average and above 145 is considered genius, but an adult with an IQ of 180 is not more or less likely to win a Nobel P...

I previously broached the subject of school performance a couple of days ago here . While funding per student has gone up five times from 1970 to 2010, test scores remain stagnant. I ronically, despite the United States having the second-best education system globally based on number of students who graduate and go on to higher education, it consistently scores lower than many other countries in benchmarks such as math and science. According to the Business Insider report in 2018, its education ranking was 38th in math scores and 24th in science. The United States' education rankings have been falling by international standards over the past three decades. It's not just math and science that are victims to our public school system.  Recent surveys show that young Americans know little about their own country, other than they hate it.  A new YouGov poll asked more than 1,000 people aged 14 and up about their knowledge of the country's history and institutions, and their patr...

Forget Critical Race Theory. U.S. Public Schools are an abject failure. In spite of more and more money, results have not improved.  Oregon Gov. Kate Brown privately signed a bill last month ending the requirement for high school students to prove proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic before graduation. Brown, a Democrat, did not hold a public signing or issue a press release regarding the passing of Senate Bill 744..., an unusually quiet approach to enacting legislation, according to the Oregonian. ...The bill, which suspends the proficiency requirements for students for three years, has attracted controversy for at least temporarily suspending academic standards... Backers argued...the new standards for graduation would aid Oregon's "Black, Latino, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Tribal, and students of color." ...Republicans criticized the proposal for lowering academic standards. "I worry that by adopting this bill, we're giving up on o...

A very well-done and interesting video. For more on this topic, visit Gapminder Foundation

Awakened parents crashing party preaching anti-white hate White students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee were instructed to “confront whiteness” on their college campus by two far-left speakers, the latest example of rampant anti-white lectures, but elsewhere the public is rising up and pushing back on the Left’s twisted version of equality. Strategies to Combat Classroom Indoctrination From critical race theory, which divides the world into race-based oppressors and oppressed, to anti-capitalism lectures, children in America’s schools are being force-fed one-sided ideological instruction. The increasingly widely used The New York Times’ 1619 curriculum, which incorrectly claimed that America was founded to protect slavery, and new mandates such as California’s controversial ethnic studies curriculum, which one teacher says teaches students “that the privileges they have are all based on race that makes them dominant or oppressors over other people,” are just a couple of promi...

1. Follow a budget. Live beneath your means. 2. Be debt free. Pay cards in full. 3. Have an emergency savings account. 4. Negotiate salary. 5. Save for retirement -- now.  https://youtu.be/8jkri0AeZWQ

https://youtu.be/yRZZpk_9k8E https://youtu.be/7_pw8duzGUg https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o https://youtu.be/WJlY9C7YWzI https://youtu.be/K5GaAQ8g4gg https://youtu.be/rytC4QsIiG8

https://youtu.be/UFX09wke9BI

A sampling of policies from the Biden campaign and/or Democratic Party platform (as stated either in writing or by Party members): End cash bail  Abolish death penalty  End solitary confinement  Give government healthcare to illegals  Expand welfare for new immigrants  Expand asylum for all new illegals End border detention End all travel bans, including from jihadist regions  Amnesty for all illegals  Rejoin Paris climate accord  Eliminate all carbon emissions by 2030  Free public housing for all former inmates  Require federal reserve to end racial inequity  Universal government healthcare Zero-emissions transport nationwide  Appoint social justice prosecutors  Implement “restorative justice”  End mandatory minimums  Incentives prison closure  Penalize “absentee homeowners” to clear way for affordable housing  Dual language instruction in public schools Outlaw charter schools that earn a profit  ...

https://youtu.be/YC4Qg4IUkvY https://youtu.be/GoUSx7RF-28 https://youtu.be/MIXtyi9WG1o https://youtu.be/Zy5u2DIA2c8

Maybe we should defund public education

"From this I conclude that the best education for the situations of actual life consists of the experience we acquire from the study of serious history. For it is history alone which without causing us harm enables us to judge what is the best course in any situation or circumstance." -- Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire (about 100 BCE). A survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that “more Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution,” “more than a third did not know the century in which the American Revolution took place,” and “half of the respondents believed the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation or the War of 1812 were before the American Revolution.” Oh, and “more than 50 percent of respondents attributed the quote ‘From each according to his ability to each according to his needs’ to either Thomas Paine, Georg...

Excerpts from an editorial by Nick Searcy, actor, director and writer: The most overused quote in 21st Century conservative columns and speeches has got to be this one, and the reason it is so overused is that we have not addressed it to this day. As the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream of culture.” We have let the Hollywood Left define the culture for at least the last 50 years. We had already conceded academia to the leftists, and as a result of their long march through the institutions, we have an army of socialist youth that rally to socialist superstars like Bernie Sanders and AOC because of their sheer ignorance of the death cult that is socialism. But now, we have been given an opening... We ceded academia to the Left 70 or so years ago, and they have been running up the score in our school systems and universities ever since. You can see the consequences of that at any Bernie Sanders rally. We now have a vast number of historically ignoran...

1: Excessive/Frivolous Spending Great fortunes are often lost one dollar at a time. It may not seem like a big deal when you pick up that double-mocha cappuccino, stop for a pack of cigarettes, have dinner out or order that pay-per-view movie, but every little item adds up. Just $25 per week spent on dining out costs you $1,300 per year, which could go toward an extra mortgage payment or a number of extra car payments. If you're enduring financial hardship, avoiding this mistake really matters – after all, if you're only a few dollars away from foreclosure or bankruptcy, every dollar will count more than ever. 2: Never-Ending Payments Ask yourself if you really need items that keep you paying every month, year after year. Things like cable television, music services or fancy gym memberships can force you to pay unceasingly but leave you owning nothing. When money is tight, or you just want to save more, creating a leaner lifestyle can go a long way to fattening your savin...