Education reform

In recent years Nevadans have seen numerous reports of special-needs students in the Clark County School District being physically abused by teachers and aides. However, as Channel 3 News reported just this week, even when physical abuse isn’t the issue, CCSD still shows regular indifference to its obligations to the most vulnerable students in its care. It’s a topic Nevada Policy’s Vice President Steve Miller has explored even further, diving deeply into the issue in our newly released 8-part series, Catch Me If You Can. Not only does it document CCSD’s history of abuse and corruption in its special-ed practices, it also reveals the district’s systematic efforts to avoid accountability and conceal wrongdoing against the very students and families its mission is to serve. (Read more)

Cronyism

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has rightly been criticized for her embarrassingly weak grasp of economic concepts. For example, she once claimed that the reason the unemployment rate was currently so low, was because so many people were “working more than one job” — an observation that was not only inaccurate, but also completely irrelevant to how the unemployment rate is actually calculated. However, some conservative pundits jumped the gun when they decided to attack the self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” for criticizing the massive tax incentive package Amazon received from the state of New York. As it turns out, Ocasio Cortez is actually mostly correct on her objection to a government handing out special tax deals to major companies through crony incentive packages. (Read more)

Environmentalism

The ongoing fires in California are tragic. The loss of human life, the homes that have been destroyed and the vast areas that have been burned to the ground are all hard to view. What’s worse, however, is that much of the devastation should have been avoidable. The federal government’s mismanagement of national land, along with the state’s ridiculous environmental protection laws, have made it almost impossible for any serious fire mitigation efforts to be carried out in recent decades. The result has been a state that is essentially a giant tinderbox just waiting for a spark. (Read more)

Labor unions

Since the Janus decision earlier this year, public sector employees across the nation have been learning about and exercising their right to opt out of unions that don’t cater to their needs. In one case highlighted by the website teacherfreedom.org, a public school teacher explains that she decided to opt out after volunteering for the union, because she felt union leadership was so busy watching out for itself it forgot about the reason most teachers joined the profession in the first place: to teach. (Read more)

Government largess

In the 2018 fiscal year, the United States Postal Service posted a $4 billion loss. That’s a 44 percent increase in losses since 2017. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: The USPS also has $13 billion in debt, and about $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. And yet, it doesn’t look like there’s any serious attempt to tackle the structural problems that are driving the agency ever further into the red. Now, just imagine if a company not backed by the U.S. government — such as UPS or FedEx — were to run a multi-billion loss for even a single year. Do you think they would still be in business? (Read more)