WASHINGTON, May 28 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering brief opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the second of two think tanks wrap-ups for May 28.
The National Center for Policy Analysis
(The NCPA is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research institute that seeks innovative private sector solutions to public policy problems.)
DALLAS, Texas -- Women's rising earning power
By Bruce Bartlett
Many women now earn more than their male counterparts. As higher-earning younger women displace lower-earning older women, this trend is likely to continue.
According to the Census Bureau, the ratio of female-to-male earnings for full-time, year-round workers hit bottom for women in 1973 at 56.6 percent. It continued to rise in following years, although it fell in Clinton's last two years in office from 74.2
percent in 1997 to 72.2 percent in 1999.
Changes in this ratio can be explained by long-term trends. For instance, the labor force participation rate for women shot up from 43.3 percent in 1970 to 51.5 percent in 1980 to 60.1 percent in 2001.
Also, young women today are far more educated than their mothers, are working more hours and are less likely to be married or have children than their counterparts 25 years ago.
-- Thirty percent of women aged 25 to 34 now have four years of college education compared with just 18 percent in 1975.
-- The percentage of such women working full-time rose from 74.3 percent in 1975 to 80.3 percent in 1999, and those working more than 50 hours a week rose from 45.5 percent to 62.9 percent.
-- In 1975, just 11 percent of women aged 25 to 34 had never been married. By 1999, that figure almost tripled to 30 percent.
-- The percentage of women with children in this age bracket fell from 76 percent to 60 percent over the same period.
As the proportion of women in higher earning occupations has increased, their earnings relative to men rose from 67 percent in 1979 to 82 percent in 2000 for young women.
(Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis.)
DALLAS, Texas -- Vouchers help minority students
Education vouchers produce better students and are particularly beneficial to minorities, says school-choice expert and Harvard University Professor Paul E. Peterson. According to his research, published in his latest book, "The Education Gap," private scholarship programs have been particularly effective in raising the academic achievement of low-income African-American students.
-- After three years in the New York City-based School Choice Scholarship Foundation program, scores for scholarship/voucher students increased 9.2 National Percentile Ranking, or NPR, points on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills compared to those who were not offered the scholarship (the "control group").
-- In three years, the effect of these scholarships/vouchers cut in half the achievement gap between black and white students.
-- Even those who attended a choice school for only part of the three years performed better than their counterparts who stayed in the public schools; for example, the NPR scores of African-American students who attended a private school for at least one year increased by nearly 7.6 points compared to those students who did not attend a choice school at all.
The National Center for Pubilc Policy Research
(NCPPR is a communications and research foundation dedicated to providing free-market solutions to today's public policy problems, based on the principles of a free market, individual liberty and personal responsibility. NCPPR was founded to provide the conservative movement with a versatile and energetic organization capable of responding quickly and decisively to late-breaking issues, based on thorough research.)
CHICAGO -- Pay Americans first: More federal land purchases would add to PILT burden
By Gretchen Randall
Background: The Bush administration has asked Congress for $165 million for fiscal year 2003 for the Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILT, program -- a decrease of $45 million from last year. The federal government does not pay local counties property taxes on the land it owns in those counties. The PILT program was designed to partially offset costs to rural counties for the loss of those tax dollars. PILT payments are used to fund schools, law enforcement, firefighting, waste disposal and other county services. But the Bureau of Land Management released a study that shows the national average PILT payment to counties is $.17 per acre versus $1.48 per acre on average if the land were privately owned and taxed.
Congress has authorized the PILT payment to be as high as $336 million per year. The Bush administration does include in its FY 2003 budget $531 million for more land acquisition by the federal government -- more than three times what it has allotted for PILT.
Ten-second response: It's a disgrace that our government does not reimburse counties for loss of taxes on federal lands. Pay Americans first before buying more land!
Thirty-second response: The federal government is not a good landlord. It doesn't pay its obligations on its landholdings to the citizens who are neighbors. These rural counties should not bear the burden of higher taxes or poorer schools so that city dwellers can have a national forest for weekend recreation. We should be giving these communities the full share of property tax dollars they would receive if the lands were privately owned and on the tax roll.
Discussion: Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives, including Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., sent a letter to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton and Mitch Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, saying: "The federal government has a legal responsibility to help support local governments in areas where the federal government has acquired land thereby removing it from the local tax base." The letter also states, "the purchase of additional lands will only add to the PILT burden" and that the federal government should "pay the taxes on the land it already owns before it extends itself further."
(Gretchen Randall is the director of the John P. McGovern, M.D., Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs at the the National Center for Public Policy Research.)
The Hoover Institution
STANFORD, Calif. -- Supporting the drug war supports terrorists
By David R. Henderson
In recent months, the United States government spent $10 million of our tax dollars for its latest anti-drug campaign. Its new pitch: If you buy illegal drugs, you're supporting terrorists because terrorists are intimately involved in the production, sale, and distribution of drugs.
Guess what? I agree. People who buy illegal drugs do support terrorists. But here's what the government leaves out: By making drugs illegal, the government is supporting terrorists even more.
Have you ever wondered why terrorist groups get involved in the illegal drug market and not, for example, in the legal market for Coca-Cola, soap or envelopes? The inaccurate answer that many people give is that the profits in dealing drugs are incredibly high, which attracts criminals. But profits are not incredibly high, once you adjust for risk: People in that trade have a nasty tendency to die or go to prison, and they insist on being compensated for that risk. Besides, if high profits were what attracted criminals, why don't those same high profits attract normal investors?
No. The reason terrorists get involved in illegal drugs is that they are criminals; once a market is made illegal, the high, risk-adjusted prices of the illegal good reward those with "criminal skills." One such skill is the ability and willingness to murder people. That's why organized crime took over the liquor industry during prohibition -- and quickly exited when prohibition ended.
Moreover, the United States government is effectively supporting left-wing terrorists in Colombia. How so? Say you're a Colombian coca producer trying to make a peso. Working against you are Colombia's military and police, pressured by U.S. government subsidies and threats and aided by U.S. military personnel and equipment. The first thing you want is protection, and the place to go for protection is to antigovernment people with guns who know how to fight.
Two such groups are the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), both revolutionary leftists. You don't have to be a left-wing ideologue yourself to decide to pay them protection money, which is just what many coca farmers and cocaine producers do.
By one estimate, the revenue to FARC from drug-related sources is more than $600 million a year, which would make it the best-funded terrorist group in the world. Thus, the war against drugs actually strengthens the position of the leftist insurgents.
These insurgents have terrorized Colombian society. Between 1981 and 1986, for example, drug traffickers murdered more than 50 Colombian judges, including 12 supreme court justices. Colombian citizens are also terrorized: More than 1 million of them emigrated in the past five years. If a similar percentage of Americans did the same, we would lose 14 million citizens -- almost half California's population.
A more informative ad line from the U.S. government would be: "When you support the drug war, you're supporting terrorists."
(David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.)
The Mackinac Center for Public Policy
Home schoolers make case for school choice
By Samuel A. Walker
Michigan is celebrating the victory of 10-year-old Calvin McCarter, the youngest competitor in a field of 55, who won the National Geographic Bee on Wednesday, May 22. Only last month, McCarter, who hails from Jenison, Mich., had become the youngest state winner ever when he bested 100 Michigan fourth- through eighth-graders at geography. He won the national contest by knowing where the Lop Nur nuclear testing site is.
Wrong. It's in China.
And don't worry. Michigan's public schools aren't making kids memorize the locations of nuclear test sites -- otherwise there might be public protests, letters to the editor, and various and sundry steps taken by the arbiters of approved school curricula to stem an outbreak of unauthorized knowledge.
No, for a child of 10 to know geography at the level of detail implied by McCarter's correct answer, it is highly likely that he or she would have been home-schooled -- as McCarter is, in fact. So is Erik Miller, 14, of Kent, Wash., who took third place. And while most of the news reports state McCarter's home schooling as simply another fact in a story about the winner of a contest, they would have done better to change their focus to home-schooled children in general.
As Home School Legal Defense Association President Mike Smith noted following the contest, only 2 percent of U.S. students are home-schooled. Yet, in the geography bee, 22 percent of the national finalists and 40 percent of the final 10 students were home-schoolers. Such a showing is nothing short of phenomenal.
At the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee, which will take place next week, 27 of the 167 contestants are home-schooled. Competing this year will be two four-year repeat contestants -- and one of them is home-schooled, Eric M. Bolt, 14, of South Bend, Ind.
Just in case anyone's keeping score, that's a 50 percent representation for home-schoolers in this particular category. Remember -- they only comprise 2 percent of the student population. Home-schoolers swept the top three spots in the same spelling bee in 2000.
At the recent USA Math Olympiad, Alison Miller, 15, of Niskayuna, N.Y., and Anders Kaseorg, 15, of Charlotte, N.C., both home-schoolers, were among the 12 winners. They follow in the footsteps of Reid Barton, the Massachusetts home schooler who won the same contest four times and was a four-time gold medalist at the International Math Olympiad. More recently, the MIT student was named a Putnam Fellow, the top honor of the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.
If public schools had similar successes to tout, tout them they would. If a group of high-potential students had graduated from a special program devised by the "schools of education" -- which prepare our nation's teachers -- and these students went on to win honors at the rate home-schoolers are gaining, such results would be trumpeted in every media venue imaginable. And the "new program" would be replicated in every public school classroom in America.
The point is that they have no such program -- and that parents, therefore, are taking matters into their own hands. Teacher-moms are packing up their broods in mini-vans and showing up, stroller entourages in tow, for national contests -- and their pupils are winning. As a group, they're doing a better job than the public schools.
Is it any wonder that there is a vital, forward-looking school choice movement to allow parents a wider range of educational choices for their children?
The Center for Strategic and International Studies
WASHINGTON -- Russia-NATO Council: Cold War legacies form new U.S.-Russian agenda
CSIS analysts made the following statements today regarding the agreement signed by Russia and NATO in Rome:
-- Celeste Wallander, director, CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program.
"With the Moscow summit last week and the Rome Summit today, the United States and Russia have not -- contrary to conventional wisdom -- ended the Cold War, which concluded more than a decade ago with the demise of the Communist Soviet Union. Instead, the summits mark the beginning of serious joint efforts to deal with legacies of the Cold War -- thousands more nuclear weapons than needed for reliable deterrence, and NATO as an exclusive military alliance with Russia as an outsider -- that threatened to become obstacles to practical cooperation. The challenge that remains is whether the U.S. and Russian leaderships can now begin work on the meaningful agenda before us: defeating global terrorism, preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and involving Russia in the international economy to give its citizens a stake in building a democratic and prosperous future."
-- Sarah Mendelson, senior fellow, CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program.
"Anchoring Russia in international organizations makes sense only if the rules, norms and laws governing those organizations are then applied to Russia. This to date has not been the case, and the international community has therefore missed an opportunity to make the demand for the protection of rights inside Russia a priority. There is a cost to this inaction for international security, especially with regard to the ongoing war in Chechnya. The way in which the Russian forces have conducted their anti-terror campaign in Chechnya is profoundly counterproductive; this is not a clean campaign, but one freighted with serious abuses that have alienated the local population and made them more susceptible to the appeal of extremism."
