On January 11, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), a potentially landmark case. If the Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, the financial strength and political clout of government employee unions across the country could be diminished greatly.

Ten California teachers and a teachers’ group, Christian Educators Association International, brought the Friedrichs case. The plaintiffs want to stop paying mandatory dues to the CTA, claiming that all activities of the union are “inherently political.” Since 1977, employees who are represented by a public-sector union can opt-out from paying union dues for political activities such as union opposition to a ballot initiative or union support for a legislative candidate. But in the 25 non-Right-to-Work states including California, these employees must still pay “agency fees” to cover the cost of union representation activities: negotiating contracts covering pay, benefits, and working conditions.

According to EdSource:

For California teachers, about $600 of their average $1,000 annual dues goes toward their fair-share [agency] fees; it is divided among their local union, the California Teachers Association, and the National Education Association for their expertise and representation. The remaining money pays for lobbying and campaigning at the local, state and federal levels.

Today Education Week released its annual “Quality Counts” report. This is one of the main annual spending rankings used to justify more money for public education.

However, spending proponents never seem to tell us just how much more we’ll need to spend for students to be proficient in the basics.

Of course it costs money to educate students, but even a cursory glance at where the money goes raises serious doubts about how academic achievement is prioritized.

As of the 2011-12 school year, the latest data year available, total per-pupil spending averaged just over $12,000 nationwide. Only slightly more than half of that amount, $6,500 or 54 percent, went toward instruction, which includes teacher salaries and benefits, supplies such as textbooks, and purchased instructional services—including services from private schools.

Several years ago, my coauthor Chris Coyne and I wrote a paper titled, “The Militarization of U.S. Domestic Policing.” Although we’ve since written on a variety of other topics, I frequently field questions on this paper and its themes.

It’s hardly a mystery why. Over the past three decades, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams or Police Paramilitary Units (PPUs) units have become prevalent throughout U.S. in cities and towns of all sizes. It’s estimated that about 20 percent of small town police departments employed a SWAT team or PPU in the mid-1980s. By the year 2000, almost 90 percent of police departments serving populations of 50,000 or more people had some kind of PPU. Now, around 80 percent of small town police departments have a SWAT team. Criminologist Peter Kraska estimates that approximately 3,000 SWAT deployments occurred annually in 1980. By the early 2000s, SWAT teams were deployed about 45,000 times a year. Current estimates place the number of SWAT deployments as high as 80,000 annually.

There he goes again: President Obama pretending that only gun lobbyists care about the fact that the Founders felt so strongly about individual gun rights (on which the Supreme Court agrees) that they made it the Second Amendment.

Maybe you’ve seen those ads of pictures of every day, friendly looking folks, with the caption: “I’m the NRA.”

Not I!

Herewith, my Open Letter:

Dear Mr. Obama,

I’m not the NRA. I’ve never given them any money, signed a petition, or could otherwise even wildly be called part of the “gun lobby.”

30 years ago, as a single woman living alone, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a suspicious sound. I called 911 and waited … in fear … for an hour.

When the police deigned to show up, they were very condescending: “Are your parents home?” (I was almost 30 for heaven’s sake!) But agreed to walk the perimeter and declared all clear.

I promptly bought a handgun and got trained to use it.

Tomorrow marks one of education’s most important  rituals: the annual release of Education Week’s “Quality Counts” report, which grades states on several criteria including spending. If history is any indication, howls about “underfunded” public education are sure to follow. In fact, by my tally at least a dozen states all claimed to be 49^th in K-12 funding in 2015 alone, about the same number as 2014, depending on the ranking and the methodology used.

The reality is total public elementary and secondary school spending now amounts to $635 billion. If that kind of spending represented market value, public K-12 education would rank second only to Apple valued at $725 billion and far ahead of ExxonMobil and Microsoft, each with a market value of more than $300 billion.

The trouble is, annual spending rankings tell us virtually nothing about how much value students and taxpayers are receiving for what we’re spending.

Right now, for instance, total per-pupil spending averages more than $12,000 nationwide. Yet alarmingly small numbers of students are doing well in reading and math based on combined proficiency rates from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Just before Christmas, Congress voted to deficit fund Obamacare by imposing moratoria on a number of Obamacare taxes that are unpopular with interest groups. Left in place was the unpopular individual mandate to buy health insurance, which has no organized interest to lobby against it. Nevertheless, it is the most unpopular part of Obamacare.

The New York Times reports that a number of relatively high-income earners are choosing to remain uninsured, or even drop Obamacare coverage, and pay the fine instead:

Rachel Kulus, 46, opts to keep antibiotics in her medicine cabinet rather than buy health insurance through the California exchange.

“I do not believe it serves the public good to entrench private insurance programs that put actual care out of reach for those they purport to serve,” she said.

Ms. Kulus, who works for a small marketing firm outside San Diego, paid about $300 a month for an exchange plan. But when she injured her back and wanted physical therapy, she was offended to learn she would have to pay for it in full because of her plan’s $6,000 deductible.

“I just went on YouTube and tried to figure it out on my own,” she said. She added that her auto insurance included personal injury protection, so “anything catastrophic will hopefully happen in the car.”

Ms. Kulus estimates that she will pay a penalty of $750 for flouting the individual mandate last year, and $950 in 2016.

(Abby Goodnough, “Many See I.R.S. Penalties as More Affordable Than Insurance,” New York Times, January 3, 2016.)

People’s willingness to swallow the penalty is driven by the fact that the plans are not worth the money. Plus, if they get sick they can enroll without penalty at the next annual open enrollment. (This is something they could not do in the pre-Obamacare individual insurance market. In most states, if they became sick, they would have been charged a much higher than standard premium.)

For several years now, President Obama has been threatening to crack down on gun sales and gun ownership, and the result has been… more guns.  As this article notes, the firearms industry is booming (pardon my phraseology), largely because of the president’s anti-gun rhetoric.  Surely a man as perceptive as President Obama can see that despite his rhetoric, his actions are responsible for putting more guns in the hands of more people.

Meanwhile, what the president is actually proposing would not limit the availability of guns to the people he says shouldn’t have them.  And, it won’t make our communities safer, despite his claims.  He wants to broaden background checks, better track illegal firearms trafficking, and improve reporting on guns stolen in transit from manufacturers and dealers, but what are the problems here?  The shooters at Newtown, Aurora, Roanoke, Charleston, and San Bernardino all used firearms legally bought after background checks.

His statement notes, “The National Firearms Act imposes restrictions on sales of some of the most dangerous weapons, such as machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. But because of outdated regulations, individuals have been able to avoid the background check requirement by applying to acquire these firearms and other items through trusts, corporations, and other legal entities.”  The reason people buy machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers through corporations is that it is illegal for individuals to buy them.  Individuals have to set up a trust or corporation to own those weapons, according to federal law.  A sensible way to make the change the president suggests is to allow individuals to buy those firearms just like they buy rifles and handguns today, and they would be subject to the same background checks.  I am pretty sure this is not the policy the president has in mind.

PwC has published its predictive Top Health Industry Trends for 2016. It is enthusiastic about the uptake of mobile and telehealth technologies, and consumerism in health care. Overall, the report is both interesting and uncontroversial.

However, there is one datum, from a consumer survey, which is hard to figure out. PwC asked consumers about paying for drugs, and found that “more than half of consumers would be willing to pay the cost of a drug over time instead of all at once.” The actual proportion was 53 percent; 17 percent were not willing, and 30 percent were not sure.

The question is hard to understand. We pay for a prescription every time we fill it. If we have a chronic illness that requires taking medicine for a long period, we do not pay for it “all at once.” Nevertheless, there is a “question behind the question” that is lurking here: How would you prefer to pay for one pill that could cure years of illness?

The obvious answer is to pay over a long period of time, while obtaining the benefit now. This is how we should pay for expensive drugs like Sovaldi, which effectively cures a type of Hepatitis C. When it first came out in 2013, it cost $84,000 for a 12 to 24 week course of treatment. However, it eliminated hundreds of thousands of dollars of treatments, including liver transplantation, for patients with previously incurable Hepatitis C.

Just three weeks after voting $40 billion of deficit financing for Obamacare, which was cheerfully signed by President Obama, Republican Congressional leaders are returning to the reconciliation distraction.

Instead of actually proposing an alternative to Obamacare, Republican Congressional leaders believe they can continue to convince us they are committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare by executing various parliamentary gymnastics that give the illusion of action.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the reconciliation bill (H.R. 3762) would cut $1.4 trillion of Obamacare spending, mostly on payments to health insurers via Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges, for the ten years through 2025. It also cuts $1 trillion of Obamacare taxes, for a net increase in the deficit of a little less than $400 billion. It does nothing to Obamacare’s federalization of the regulation of health insurance.

That is all to the good, except for one thing: President Obama is guaranteed to veto the bill if Congress passes it. What is the point?

The new film “The Big Short”–based on the book by Michael Lewis–achieves what I would’ve thought impossible: it makes an American audience root for speculators hoping to make millions betting against the U.S. economy. Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, and Steve Carell are the Hollywood stars portraying the real-life people who had realized U.S. housing was in a bubble, and that the mortgage-backed securities based on them were much riskier than most people realized.

To be sure, the movie gives the impression that the commercial lenders, Wall Street investment banks, and ratings agencies (Moody’s, S&P, Fitch) were infested by rogues who needed stricter government regulation. In that respect, I disagree with the message; I think it was sins of government commission that blew up the housing bubble. In particular, the Fed’s easy credit fueled the boom while various federal programs steered funds into housing.