In America, boys are struggling academically while Congress continues to provide millions in funding for the Women’s Educational Equity Act. A new report by Independent Women’s Forum visiting fellow Krista Kafer, “Taking the Boy Crisis in Education Seriously: How School Choice Can Boost Achievement Among Boys and Girls,” reveals how too many boys are falling behind in our current education system and offers school choice as the remedy:

“Girls surpass boys in reading, writing, civics, and the arts. Girls get better grades and more honors; they have higher aspirations, are more engaged in school and are more likely to graduate from high school and college. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely to be suspended or expelled, need special education, smoke, drink and do drugs, repeat a grade, commit suicide, become incarcerated, leave school without attaining literacy, drop out of school or be unemployed. Marginal advantages in math and science for boys pale compared to the sheer advantage girls enjoy throughout school.”

Kafer buries the myth of shortchanged girls and the need for the Women’s Educational Equity Act, recommending that the nation must finally take seriously the plight of boys by embracing new strategies and ideas in education. Encouraging greater innovation in educational methods and a broad range of school choice options would alleviate the inequality in achievement.

Forty states and the District of Columbia now have state laws allowing the establishment of independent public charter schools. Many of these schools were established as single-sex schools or co-educational schools that make use of single-sex classrooms—environments that have been shown to narrow achievement gaps between boys and girls. Many states have also made private school more accessible for low- and middle- income students in recent years. Since each child learns differently, parents should decide what is best for their own children. School choice is the key to making sure that every child succeeds.

For more information, see the Independent Women’s Forum’s new report here.

##
Elizabeth Smitham is an intern in Domestic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation

Senate Democratic and Republican leaders proposed tougher earmark disclosure rules Tuesday but left in place an exemption that would allow sponsors of thousands of earmarks to remain hidden.

New language proposed by Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican who represents Kentucky, continues to exempt "federal" projects, such as Department of Defense construction projects, that constitute a large portion of earmarks.

But there's an even bigger exception: This approach would not apply at all to the 95 percent of earmarks, according to CRS, that are not listed within the text of a bill. Thus 95 percent or more of earmarks would not be subject to "tougher" disclosure. That's not reform at all.

As always, look to Sen. Tom Coburn for good ideas on spending issues, especially this proposal:

Coburn urged President Bush to instruct agencies to ignore report language that does not have the force of law but that contains instructions for the bulk of earmarks. The president has joined in a call for an earmark overhaul but has allowed agencies to continue funding earmarks that are not included in bill text.

If an earmark is not in the bill, it is not the law.

A bill introduced by a prominent Republican has buoyed hopes by environmentalists that a narrowly divided Senate can achieve bipartisan accord on climate change legislation.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has introduced a bill that would require automakers to boost passenger-vehicle fuel efficiency standards to 40 miles per gallon. The still-unnumbered measure aims to reduce the burning of fossil fuels and cut down on the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.

As a colleague of ours responded: "40 miles to the gallon? That is a disaster. We’re going to have cars made of balsa wood."

Stevens, of course, represents Alaska and was one of the biggest pork-barrel spenders in the former Republican majority. He is also a long-time supporter of opening Alaska's ANWR for oil exploration, a measure that nearly, so nearly passed in the last session. Is Stevens seeking to strike grand compromise here--tougher efficiency standards (no matter the costs to consumers in terms of choice, price, and safety) in exchange for opening ANWR?

Raising CAFE standard is just bad policy. While raising costs to consumers and limiting choice, CAFE has failed to accomplish its purposes. Oil imports have not decreased. Rather they increased from about 35 percent of supplies in the mid-1970s to 52 percent in 2001. And consumption has not decreased. As fuel efficiency improves, consumers have generally increased their driving, offsetting nearly all the gains in fuel efficiency--the only countervailing factor has been higher gas prices due to OPEC and international issues, not CAFE. Not only has CAFE failed to meet its goals; it has had consequences. As vehicles were being made lighter to achieve more miles per gallon and meet the standards, the number of fatalities from crashes rose.

Worse, a grand compromise involving CAFE and ANWR could result in few gains for U.S. energy supplies if the agreement opens ANWR but limits exploration and drilling there too much. A win on paper is not necessarily a win in practice.

Add up the numbers. Taxpayers pay directly for the health care of two-fifth of all covered Americans through Medicare, Medicaid, military health programs, and insurance for government workers. Add in the tax subsidy for employer-provided health care, which is about $208.6 billion in 2006. According to economist Thomas Selden, the government spends about $1.2 trillion on health care each year, or 61 percent of the total that Americans spend on health care. On top of that, add another 5 percent to cover the federal mandate that hospitals provide care to the uninsured, and the government pays right around two-thirds of the cost of health care.

Canada, which has a single-payer system, pays around 70 percent of its citizens’ health care spending. Just four percent more than in the United States.

Single-payer care? We’re already there.

What do we get for all that money? For one, Bill Gates will get generous taxpayer-funded coverage when he turns 65 and enters Medicare. Seniors, most of whom had private drug coverage last year, have mostly government-funded coverage this year. Workers switch coverage when they switch jobs or go without between jobs. Medicaid enrollees search near and far for doctors willing to accept their coverage, and the same is happening more and more for Medicare patients. Even when they are covered through their employers, workers get complicated plans, not of their choosing, that may not meet their needs. Many are pushed into buying coverage that violates their ethical and religious beliefs.

For all that money, $1.2 trillion per year, we don’t get a good health care system.

But the problem definitely isn’t because of competition and reliance on the market. The problem is that government health care spending removes so many Americans from the market. But right now, there is not much of a market, where people can pick and choose the kind of health care they want.

What would happen if you had a market? Paradoxically, the only place where you have anything even approaching a market for health insurance is the federal government itself. In the imperfect but functional Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, individuals and families get to choose their own care and face incentives to consume health services wisely. Unlike most Americans, who don’t have much choice, federal employees are happy with their choices and their coverage.

Americans still enjoy a bit more competition and choice than Canadians. Perhaps that’s why Canadians sue their government to be allowed to purchase health services on the market and why so many Canadians stream into the U.S. each year to use our health care market.

So competition and choice are our strengths, but as Daniel Gross observes, mandates, regulations, and bad government policies are pushing more and more Americans out of the market and into the government’s arms.

Expanding the government’s role in health care is no solution to what ails us. It’s already the disease.

Mistake from the start might soon get worse

A Republican-controlled Congress created this fiscal monstrosity—a largely unnecessary universal entitlement expected to add another $8 trillion to the long-term debt of the taxpayers who must pay for the promised drug benefits. Now, Democratic leaders soon to take charge say they want to improve the program in two ways: eliminate “gaps” in the drug benefit (the “donut hole”) and cut program costs via some as-yet-ill-defined system of price controls.

Filling in the donut hole will mean pouring in even more taxpayers’ dollars. It’s hard to imagine Congress can slash drug prices enough to offset those additional costs to the taxpayer without creating new problems for seniors in trying to get newer and more effective medicines.

Also, no good ever comes of trying to repeal the economic law of supply and demand by imposing price controls. You have a better chance of repealing the laws of gravity. Lawmakers can’t control consumers’ demand for drugs or anything else. They can only control supply. And that produces the dynamics of the Old Soviet Grocery Store: “Yes, comrades, you are all entitled to free bread. So come back tomorrow, we’re all out today.” Price controls inevitably produce shortages of both quantity and quality in the goods or services controlled.

Forget about tinkering with the Medicare drug program. Congress should get on to the serious business of fixing Medicare itself. Within five years, the first wave of 77 million baby boomers will start retiring. They will hit the Medicare system like a tsunami. It will take huge tax increases or savage benefit cuts just to prop up the system.

Far better to set up a new system for new retirees: Let them enroll in the new Medicare Advantage program, or carryover their existing private health plans — including their drug coverage — into retirement. A fixed government contribution to the plan of their choice would offset their costs, just as it does for today’s federal workers and retirees. The only major difference: the level of assistance would vary according to need—financial or medical. However, there would be a fixed annual limit to the government contribution.

Beyond a doubt, baby boomers will boost Medicare costs far beyond the tab rung up by The Greatest Generation. But consumer choice and competition will control costs better — and deliver higher quality care — than artificial price controls from Congress.

But it could be worse, of course. At least the benefit is letting private insurers compete with one another to provide seniors with drug coverage, keeping costs below what many had predicted and leaving most seniors satisfied. So it is a boondoggle, but it does show that market competition works and saves taxpayer dollars. If only that principle could be applied to the entire Medicare program, our fiscal future would be in much better shape.

So what exactly is in the bill? The Budget Committee has prepared a helpful handout. Some highlights:

• Rum Excise Tax Revenue Sharing with Puerto Rico,
  
• Cotton Trust Fund,
  
• Makes Permanent the Capital Gains Treatment for Self-Created Musical Works.
  

These tax extenders have come before the Congress before as part of the "trifecta" bill. That legislation combined the tax extenders with death tax relief and a minimum wage hike. It did not pass.

At the time, Bill Beach explained why these tax extenders were a bad idea. He wrote,

Our current tax code is riddled with enormous tax breaks for particular types of economic and social behavior, and subsidies that the code gives certain taxpayers is a major reason why our broken tax code remains unreformed. After all, why would anyone want to give up a claim to a big tax break? The “tax extenders” about to be considered by the Senate would perpetuate these tax subsidies and, in some instances, increase their value to taxpayers.

Gregg's opposition to this bill marks the second time in three days that he has spoken out on behalf of taxpayers. Remember that on Tuesday he successfully scuttled an $800 million increase in "emergency" aid for agriculture.

In Austria, the paper reports, patients pay the same amount to fill a prescription no matter the cost of the drug. As a result,

We have big amounts of medicine thrown away every year because people don't have to pay for it," said Christoph Hörhan, a spokesman for the Austrian Ministry of Health and Women. "We started to print the price on the package to let them know what it costs, but it didn't help."

Now Austria is using managed care to control spending, and that means fewer choices for patients.

A way to control spending without resorting to managed care is through consumer-driven health plans, such as Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). In October, Greg D'Angelo and Bob Moffit wrote on the benefits of HSAs and explained how they could be improved.

The updated forecast projects somewhat slower economic growth in the near-term than was projected in June 2006. Specifically, the forecast projects real gross domestic product (GDP) will grow 3.1 percent and 2.9 percent during the four quarters of 2006 and 2007, respectively. These growth rates are similar to the U.S. historical average.

Other good news includes a forecasted unemployment rate of 4.6 percent for 2006 and 2007.

We should be careful not to take this good economic news for granted. Today's numbers only strengthen the case for pro-growth policies. If Americans want to sustain this level of growth, their representatives in Washington need to implement the kinds of policies that will leave it intact.

So what can lawmakers do to continue, and perhaps increase, growth? Maintaining pro-growth tax policies would be a good place to start. Lawmakers would also be wise to avoid policies and regulations that would adversely affect businesses and workers--such as raising the minimum wage. Of course, there's the need to rein in spending. And, if lawmakers are feeling ambitious, they could always take on the most serious threat to our fiscal house: long-term entitlement spending.

EU countries closely regulate pharmaceutical prices whereas the U.S. does not. This paper shows how price constraints affect the profitability, stock returns, and R&D spending of EU and U.S. firms. Compared to EU firms, U.S. firms are more profitable, earn higher stock returns, and spend more on research and development (R&D). Some differences have increased over time. In 1986, EU pharmaceutical R&D exceeded U.S. R&D by about 24 percent, but by 2004, EU R&D trailed U.S. R&D by about 15 percent. During these 19 years, U.S. R&D spending grew at a real annual compound rate of 8.8 percent, while EU R&D spending grew at a real 5.4 percent rate. Results show that EU consumers enjoyed much lower pharmaceutical price inflation, however, at a cost of 46 fewer new medicines introduced by EU firms and 1680 fewer EU research jobs.

As the paper points out, Europeans do pay less than Americans for prescription drugs. Innovation, however, is the casualty of these lower costs. Even those who bemoan drug companies' profitability should have a hard time arguing on behalf of policies that would adversely affect research--and the new drugs that come from this research--that can improve lives.

The new legislation would include only the tax extenders, which are a strange mix of special-interest subsidies, incentives for bad state-level tax policy, and handouts to business. Extending these things for a year would cost $15 billion, according to the JCT. Another year would add $10 billion to the price.

Bill Beach argues that these special exemptions and credits injure the cause of tax reform:

Our current tax code is riddled with enormous tax breaks for particular types of economic and social behavior, and subsidies that the code gives certain taxpayers is a major reason why our broken tax code remains unreformed. After all, why would anyone want to give up a claim to a big tax break? The “tax extenders” about to be considered by the Senate would perpetuate these tax subsidies and, in some instances, increase their value to taxpayers.

These extenders are basically special-interest pork masquerading as tax cuts. Real tax cuts that boost the economy are broad based, don't play favorites, usually don't make the tax code much more complicated, and reduce negative incentives on productive activity. The extenders package fails on all counts.

Congress would do far better to get the ball rolling on real tax reform. Really, even doing nothing would be a better course. And if the GOP is truly interested in reclaiming its mantle as the party for fiscal conservatives, Larry Kudlow has a proposal that would take a big step in that direction and maybe even put the heat on Democrats hoping to boost taxes over the next two years.

Peak oil is the idea that oil production will soon hit a peak and fall off precipitously as supplies dwindle. The folks behind peak oil seem like standard nutty alarmists, but some bright people have fallen for the idea, too. A number of environmentalists also buy into it; for them, it's a sort of moral comeuppance for the absolute wrong of carbon-based energy. Some are really just millenarians, basically, and believe that the end of oil will be our end, too.

Fortunately, their faith is misplaced, argues a new report from Yergin's firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "[T]he remaining global oil resource base is actually 3.74 trillion barrels -- three times as large as the 1.2 trillion barrels estimated by the theory’s proponents -- and...the "peak oil" argument is based on faulty analysis which could, if accepted, distort critical policy and investment decisions and cloud the debate over the energy future."

Rather than a peak, expect a plateau:

Global production will eventually follow an “undulating plateau” for one or more decades before declining slowly. The global production profile will not be a simple logistic or bell curve postulated by geologist M. King Hubbert, but it will be asymmetrical – with the slope of decline more gradual and not mirroring the rapid rate of increase -- and strongly skewed past the geometric peak. It will be an undulating plateau that may well last for decades.

Peak oil never made much sense, really. First, oil "reserves" count only oil that is extractable at a certain cost. But as the prices of gas and other petroleum products rise, lots of oil that is now too expensive would be booked as reserves and extracted. This alone should put a damper on any sudden drop-off in energy production or rise in prices.

Second, at higher prices, there's less demand. So if prices rise, we'll just put oil-based products to fewer low-value uses. Walking and biking will become more attractive alternatives. Consumers will demand more fuel efficient cars.

Third, the availability of substitutes caps energy prices. When energy prices rise to a certain level, alternative means of energy production become more attractive. Nuclear, hydrogen, wind, wave, solar, and others fall into this camp. For now, on a dollar basis, these sources are just too expensive for many uses. But their prices are falling.

The key is that we value oil for its uses and not intrinsically--in the end, it's just sticky, mucky black stuff. So far as its uses are concerned, we can substitute other energy sources, and they just might cost a bit more--not great but hardly catastrophic. And if oil production falls off gradually, as CERA's study indicates it will, the likely cost difference will be very small in the end.

Malthus and many since him have prognosticated about the future but undervalued human ingenuity. Their predictions tend towards crisis; but reality keeps coming up with very different outcomes.

A bipartisan Congress should harness these forces of inertia and mandate that all employers not otherwise offering a retirement plan establish a check-off IRA (CIRA) for employees. An employer could take out a minimum percentage (e.g., 3%) of their employees' wages from their paychecks, tax deductible in the year of contribution. But employees would have 60 days from their enrollment date to increase their contribution rate, or to opt out completely of any payroll deduction. The employer utilizing this auto-enrollment approach would be protected from legal liability by a safe harbor, if the employer followed specified procedures and provided specified disclosures.

A concrete proposal for this kind of automatic IRA already exists. It's called, conveniently enough, the Automatic IRA, and it was proposed earlier this year by a diverse pair that commands strong bipartisan respect: Heritage's David John and Brookings' J. Mark Iwry. In addition to legal indemnification for employers offering Auto-IRAs, the pair propose temporary tax credits to tempt small employers to offer the option to their employees.

As Pozen points out, financial institutions would jump at the opportunity to administer auto-IRA-type programs, and workers would enjoy full portability of their accounts as they move between jobs.

It doesn't matter which party is in charge of Congress. This is an idea that's ready for Congress's consideration.

To complement this study, Goldwater has also unveiled an interactive map from which you can easily view the progress your state has made in reducing poverty. D.C. gets an "F."

The study and map should provide good rebuttals for those who argue that what's need to reduce poverty is big government, not low-tax free enterprise policies.

The PBGC is the government entity that takes over failing defined benefit pensions. These are the kinds of pensions that your grandfather's generation received: put in 40 years at the same job and you get a monthly stipend for life. Today most workers use defined contribution accounts--like 401ks--but a few industries still offer the old kind of pensions. And a lot of those industries have been going belly up in recent years. That's when the PBGC takes over their pension obligations.

As the article linked above reports, a good part of the reason the PBGC is in better shape this year is legislation passed earlier this year that provides more money to the PBGC from the companies operating these pensions. In fact, one specific provision is the cause of most of the improvement:

PBGC mainly attributed the shrinking deficit to a provision in the new pension law that carves out special treatment for the airline industry, giving airlines that are in bankruptcy court and have frozen their pension plans extra time for their pension plans to become financially whole.

To call this misleading would be an understatement. The new law gives airlines special treatment that could make the total cost to taxpayers of their failed pension plans even higher than before. David John explains:

The special treatment provision would allow airline pension plans to fully fund their pension promises over either 17 years or 10 years instead of the 7-year period that would be required for pension plans in other industries....

The special treatment gives the airlines two options: Either freeze the pension plan so that no new benefits are credited to employees or allow employees to build pension benefits but pay for those new benefit promises on an expedited basis. In either case, under the language that was included in the Senate bill, the current unfunded pension promises could be funded over 17 years using a much higher interest rate (8.85 percent) than the rate that other pension plans would be required to use. As a result, airline pension plans not only would have much longer to pay for the benefits, but also would have to contribute less money to be considered fully funded....

On top of that, even if airline pension plans do freeze their benefits, they will continue to pay out full promised benefits to current retirees and close to full promised benefits to employees who retire early within that 17-year period. However, their pension plans’ underfunding would not be significantly reduced for many years. Thus, if an airline filed for bankruptcy again—and many of them have filed for bankruptcy a number of times—its pension plan could be even more severely underfunded than it is now.

And even if the worst is avoided, the new law won't completely fill the PBGC's funding gap. This story isn't over yet.

Heritage's Brian Rield counts upwards of 10,000 earmarked projects in the 11 remaining appropriations bills, which is about the same amount of pork as last year. After getting throttled at the ballot box for their fiscal largess, the Republican Congress apparently hasn't taken voters' disgust to heart. Riedl's list of the worst pork projects in the bills contains a few howlers like there:

• $1,000,000 for Mormon Cricket & Grasshopper Activities in Utah
• $575,000 for Detroit Renaissance (Good luck!)
• $6,371,000 for Wood Utilization Research (!?)
• $175,000 for the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy (Agassi has $31 million in career earnings, plus probably more in endorsement fees)

So it's business as usual, in other words.

Except not exactly. Sen. Tom Coburn, a true fiscal conservative, plans to offer up to 40 amendments to strip some of the worst pork out of the Ag appropriations bill.

The Senate needs more like Coburn.

And perhaps the Democrats will have better luck controlling spending. Heritage's Ron Utt thinks that House Speaker-to-be Pelosi has a chance to put an end to this earmarking madness.

So will appropriations next year be any different? At the least, with his party-mates out of power, Sen. Coburn should have a few more allies.