3.27.00
Rocky Times for Bilingual Ed

3.24.00
Crooked Coelho

3.23.00
Overdosing On Scandal

3.22.00
Playing Defense; Camelot's End

3.21.00
The Cox Boomlet Begins

olorado voters will have a chance to banish bilingual education this fall, if Linda Chavez has her way. The longtime D.C.-based activist, who grew up in Denver, is currently working to put an initiative modeled on California's Proposition 227 on the November ballot. Her local partners are former University of Colorado Spanish professor Charles King, Denver businessman Joe Chavez (no relation), and Republican congressman Tom Tancredo. Signature gathering will start in May.

The initiative would amend the state constitution to require English learners to be taught in what's called "structured English immersion," which promotes the common-sense idea that teachers should perform classroom instruction in English. Traditional bilingual-education programs, of course, deliberately prevent kids from learning to speak, read, and write in English as quickly as possible. The results of that can be catastrophic. Colorado's Independence Institute reports that 80 percent of Denver's bilingual-ed students have failed to make any real progress toward learning English.

Arizona also appears likely to have an anti-bilingual education initiative on the ballot this fall, backed by Prop. 227 author Ron K. Unz. One important difference between the Arizona and Colorado efforts is that Chavez and her team would exempt charter schools from the new regulations. Arizona's conservative education chief Lisa Keegan opposes Unz's proposal in part because it has no such exemption.

TAX BITES
"Americans' Federal Tax Level Falls" was the headline of a front-page, above the-fold story in the Washington Post on Sunday. The message of the story, by Glenn Kessler: "Federal income taxes are so low for so many Americans that it is little wonder many voters place tax cuts near the bottom of their priorities in many opinion polls." In case the point has been missed, the headline on one of the jump pages is "Polls Show Little Voter Support for Tax Cuts."

It's certainly true that many Americans pay little or nothing in federal income taxes. That's because the tax code is progressive. And it's also true that this fact reduces the political appeal of tax cuts. That's part of what's wrong with tax progressivity.

But there's a lot more to the story — and the Joint Economic Committee of Congress plans to have a response out by the end of Monday. The Post's headline is false because it excludes federal payroll taxes and excise taxes. The Post cites an estimate by the conservative Tax Foundation: "[T]he median two-earner family, making $68,605, paid 8.8 percent of their income in federal tax, about the same as 1955." But payroll taxes are federal taxes too. In 1955, the family making $68,605 paid $168 in payroll taxes. Today's bill is $10,496.56 — an increase of 6,148 percent. (Halfway through the article, Kessler acknowledges in passing that he's not counting payroll taxes — which doesn't excuse the misleading terminology used throughout the story.)

Relevant facts on Bush's tax cut plan are also left out of the story. Kessler notes that according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the wealthiest ten percent of Americans would realize more than 60 percent of the savings from Bush's plan. But he doesn't note that this is roughly proportional to the share of income taxes these families pay.

Also, Kessler presents estimates, presumably from ITEP, of the percentage of taxes that families at different income levels would save under the plan. But these figures are meaningless unless we know the definition of income ITEP is using (modelers sometimes, for technical reasons, ascribe more income to people than they think they're making). It looks as though Kessler's estimates include Bush's estate-tax cut. But what's the point of measuring the size of this tax cut against annual income? The estate tax isn't a tax on income.

Oh, and about those polls: The latest Rasmussen poll finds that if people are asked about a proposal to reserve all Social Security taxes for the trust fund and give back the remaining surplus to taxpayers, 67 percent favor the idea. Seventeen percent are opposed. They probably write for the Washington Post.

QUITE POSSIBLY TRUE
Hillary Clinton, in New York magazine: "I've gone from a Barry Goldwater Republican to a New Democrat, but I think my underlying values have remained pretty constant."

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