Senate Proposal: Let's Drop More Money Out of Airplanes

by Daniel L. Bennett

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Senator Tom Harkin (D, IA), who heads the senate education committee, has introduced a bill this week that will inject

$23-billion into state budgets for school districts and colleges just as money from the federal stimulus law begins to run out

in order to:

give states money to fill budget gaps and avoid layoffs once money from the stimulus measure's State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, which gave states $39.6-billion for education, is spent.

The bill was introduced as an emergency spending bill, meaning that it would be exempt from the meaningless pay-as-you-go rules that require new spending to be financed. In other words, Harkin's plan is to drop more money out of airplanes for education. This is just the latest effort to redistribute more taxpayer money into the education system without getting anything in return that would begin to move us towards meaningful education reform.

Richard Vedder has proposed the 3 I's for education reform: incentives, information and innovation. If the public is going to support the financing of education, then it needs to start demanding these things and stop pretending that education is somehow a special case that can indefinitely avoid accountability as it vacuums up increasing amounts of American wealth into its bottomless pit.