Public school per-pupil spending has increased for the fifth consecutive year, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The county’s top-five spenders for 2017 are New York ($23,091), the District of Columbia ($21,974), Connecticut ($19,322), New Jersey ($18,920) and Vermont ($18,290). California comes in at number 21, spending $12,143 per pupil (see Summary Table 11, available here).

Total nationwide spending for public K-12 education in 2017 was $694 billion, up from $671 billion in 2016. This change represents a 3.4 percent increase. In comparison, inflation increased by 2.1 percent, and student enrollment increased by just one-tenth of 1 percent (based on Summary Table 19, available here).

Millennials know China as a country that makes a lot of cool electronic products and occasionally tangles with the United States on trade. Millennials may be unaware, however, that 30 years ago, China’s one-party totalitarian regime was crushing a student revolt that came to be known as Tiananmen Square. That kind of repressive action became inevitable in the 1940s, when Chinese revolutionaries adopted a nineteenth-century European ideology. Marxism-Leninism proclaimed that history was moving toward a communist society, in which an allegedly all-wise vanguard calls the shots.

Trouble is, as F.A. Hayek explained in The Road To Serfdom, no group of leaders, however enlightened, can possibly command the knowledge to plan entire society for the greater benefit of all. True to form, under the “Great Leap Forward” of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, approximately 20 million people died of starvation between 1959 and 1962. Even so, Mao and the Communist Party elite remained in power.

“One free man will say with truth what he thinks and feels amongst thousands of men who by their acts and words attest exactly the opposite. It would seem that he who sincerely expressed his thought must remain alone, whereas it generally happens that every one else, or the majority at least, have been thinking and feeling the same things but without expressing them. And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority. And as soon as this opinion is established, immediately by imperceptible degrees, but beyond power of frustration, the conduct of mankind begins to alter.”
—Leo Tolstoy

On June 4, 1989, the Chinese government launched a brutal military crackdown on student-led demonstrations assembled in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. For seven weeks prior, protestors swelled into the hundreds of thousands (over a million at the height of the protests, according to some reports) and called for freedom of speech, freedom of press, government accountability, and an end to cronyism and corruption. Although the fledgling Chinese Democracy Movement was composed of many factions with many different agendas, broadly speaking, it aimed for liberal reforms.

Before and since becoming president, Donald Trump has consistently maintained that the U.S. trade deficit in general—and the trade deficit with China in particular—is bad for Americans. As he says, again and again, Americans “lose” by importing goods from abroad and gain by exporting goods to foreigners. His tariff increases and newly imposed tariffs have been aimed, or so he claims, at reducing the U.S. trade deficit and thereby cutting Americans’ “losses.”

Economists and people with an elementary understanding of economics have condemned this view from the beginning as folly and as harmful to the economic well-being of Americans and foreigners alike. But the president and his advisors have ignored or shrugged off such criticism, dismissing it as at variance with what people can see plainly with their own eyes, such as increased employment in certain firms benefiting from tariff-hobbled foreign competition.

As sports fans across the country are discovering, the Women’s College World Series is quite the show of athletic prowess. These college students swing for the fences, turn double plays, and make spectacular catches at the fence.

Any male hitter, even professional grade, might think twice about facing University of Washington pitcher Taran Alvelo or Samantha Show from the University of Oklahoma, who also swings a mean bat. Montana Fouts of the University of Alabama can also really swing it. The stands are packed out for every game, and  ESPN is broadcasting the series. Sports fans tune in to see the players, but the the players are the only ones not getting paid.

The Women’s College World Series is a project of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Like their male counterparts in college football and basketball, the women get paid in kind, with a scholarship. This “compensation” is more of an injustice for the women because there is no women’s professional softball league where the women can go to test the market for their talent. And like the men, the women are forbidden from marketing their own name and image. If that is not exploitation, it’s hard to know what to call it.

One of Benjamin Franklin’s most famous sayings involves the certainty of both death and taxes:

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Alas, there is now a third thing of which we can now be certain of in this world, which has become apparent only because the first two things have joined together to reveal it: government waste.

Writing in Forbes, OpenTheBooks’ Andrew Andrzewjewski has added up all the taxpayer dollars the U.S. government has improperly paid out as benefits to dead Americans last year and found the number is not small.

Dead people received $1 billion in benefits. Medicare, Medicaid, social security payments and also the federal retirement annuity payouts (pensions) kept flowing to dead recipients.

Last year, drug producer Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics received significant criticism for attempting to offer patients access to an experimental treatment procedure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (often called ALS or Lou Gherig’s disease) for $300,000. A drug recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration dwarfs this price.

A new gene therapy drug named Zoglensma became the most expensive drug in the world, costing patients over $2.1 million for one-time use. Zoglensma joins a small (and outlandishly expensive) group of treatments called gene therapy drugs. Gene therapy uses actual genes to treat or prevent diseases.

Before Zoglensma’s approval, its predecessor treatment, named Spinraza, cost patients $750,000 for the first year’s treatment and an additional $375,000 for each additional year. Other FDA approved gene therapy treatments cost between $375,000 and $875,000.

San Francisco public defender-filmmaker Jeff Adachi passed away at age 59 on February 22, reportedly from cocaine and alcohol plus a heart condition. Local reporter Bryan Carmody thought the circumstances were unusual and began to investigate. Carmody told Matthew Keys of the California Globe that as he gathered information, an unnamed individual provided him with a 16-page police dossier with photographs and investigator’s reports. San Francisco police began pestering Carmody for the source of his report, which he declined to reveal. The reporter was not charged with a crime, but San Francisco police chief William Scott said the reporter “crossed the line,” motivated by profit or animosity toward Adachi.

Two judges issued search warrants, and on May 10 the police broke down Carmody’s door with a sledgehammer and held the reporter in handcuffs for six hours. Police confiscated Carmody’s notebooks, cellphone, computer, hard drives, and cameras, taking away video equipment worth more than $30,000. Carmody still declined to reveal his source.

The United States Postal Service is a chronic money loser and politicians have failed to trim its most wasteful services, such as Saturday delivery. For his part, Vermont socialist and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders wants to expand the USPS into banking.

As Sanders writes in a May 9 Medium commentary, “Today’s loan sharks wear expensive suits and work on Wall Street, where they make hundreds of millions of dollars in total compensation by charging sky-high fees and usurious interest rates, and head financial institutions like JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and American Express.” For Sanders, “an important way to provide decent banking opportunities for low-income communities is to allow the U.S. Postal Service to engage in basic banking services.”

Despite the accumulation of nearly ten years worth of evidence that the U.S. government cannot make money from its student loan business despite having a near monopoly in it, it may soon get into a whole new lending racket.

But what makes this lending racket different is that what they would offer their political crony clients is little more than a taxpayer bailout by another name. Writing at RealClearMarkets, Alex Pollack explains the business model being advanced by the legislative authors of H.R. 397:

Here’s a remarkable lending opportunity to consider: Let’s make billions of dollars in loans to borrowers which “are insolvent” or in “critical or declining status.” These loans would be unsecured and no payments of principal would be due for 30 years. At that point, in case of default, the loans would be forgiven. Would you make such a loan? Obviously not, and neither would anybody else—except maybe the government. This idea is one only politicians could love, since it gives them a way to spend the taxpayers’ money without calling it spending.

Making such loans is proposed in a bill before the House Ways and Means Committee, entitled “Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act” (HR 397). The borrowers would be multiemployer (union) pension funds which are deeply underfunded, insolvent in the sense of having obligations much greater than their assets, and won’t have the money to pay the benefits they have promised. A more forthright title for the bill would be the “Taxpayer Bailout of Multiemployer Pension Funds Act.”