In the Alabama State House, the familiar refrain surrounding public education is that the legislature has failed to ever "fully fund" it. The implication, of course, is that we cannot and should not expect positive outcomes from our public schools. This p ...
The Coming Storm in ACA Implementation
Had the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the poorly-named Affordable Care Act in King v. Burwell, almost 500,000 Alabamians could have been spared the cost of the program's individual mandate. Premiums for a healthy 21-year-old would have dropped by ...
Governor is Right to Take Gambling off the Table
Supporters of expanding gambling in Alabama often hype the opportunities missed by our state to "keep Alabama gambling dollars in Alabama." Given the economic and social damage that would come with establishing a compact with the Poarch Creek Indian ...
Better Late than Never: Time to Legalize Charter Schools in Alabama
Click to view research paper: "Charter Schools in Alabama: Challenges and Solutions" Since 1992, public charter schools have offered families in other states a choice when it comes to which public school their children can attend. Charter schools are pu ...
Increasing Gambling Isn’t the Answer to State Budget Woes
With spiraling mandatory spending and reduced tax revenues threatening to send one or both of the state's budgets into proration, the options of raising additional income by establishing a compact with the Poarch Creek Indians or legalizing a stat ...
Cultural Indicators: the gap between education funding and outcomes
Alabamians will likely spend almost six billion dollars on public K-12 education in the next academic year. Like clockwork, grave concerns will be voiced in the next legislative session that this amount is not enough, and that higher taxes, an educa ...
Improving Alabama’s Culture Will Involve Civility, Responsibility and Self-Control
Twenty years ago, former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett noticed a disturbing set of developments in American society. The American ideals of freedom, opportunity, and representative government were prevailing in former Cold War nations, ...
The White House’s War on Wildfires
Seeing an opportunity to buttress the Administration’s call to action on climate change, the White House’s science czar, John Holdren, recently linked the large number of wildfires currently burning in California to climate change. “The evidence is ...
Energy Resources and the American Will to Develop Them
At the beginning of the first energy crisis in 1973, the United States imported 35% of the petroleum it needed. Faced with an embargo by OPEC for supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War, America opted to reduce its dependence on foreign oil by cutti ...
How the ACA Will Affect Alabama Labor
Photo from al.com As the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) continue to be implemented, there are now more signs that the Administration’s labyrinthine healthcare program has the potential to cripple the vulnerable populations it had originally ...