'76 Blog

Budgeting is about setting priorities.In most states, K-12 education is the top priority and receives the lion’s share of funding.  Yet across the country, states are grappling with a budget monster that pits education funding against federal health care mandates.In the last three years, total spending on K-12 education in Colorado has fallen by $389 million.  Spending on health care, however, has increased by $763 million during that same period.The problem is that states no longer have the ability to set their own priorities.  The federal-state Medicaid “partnership” increasingly resembles a shotgun wedding.  A state that rejects the federal spending mandates also loses out on federal matching funds that pay for half of the $5 billion price tag of Colorado’s program.In the past five years, the number of Coloradans participating in Medicaid has swollen from 391,962 to 613,148.  If that weren’t a big enough problem, ObamaCare (ironically named the “Affordable Care Act”) locks in current spending and requires states to expand eligibility to 133% of the federal poverty level.  Worse still, government health care programs are notorious for exponentially exceeding estimated costs.Two years ago, the Colorado legislature, then controlled by Democrats, passed a $600 million hidden tax on hospital patients.  Hospitals are prohibited from itemizing this “fee” on patients’ bills.  The state planned to use this fee to leverage more federal matching funds and expand Medicaid eligibility to all adults whose income was at or below the federal poverty level.According a Denver Post story by Tim Hoover, state bureaucrats estimated that the new program would serve 49,200 people at a cost of $197 million per year.  In fact, the number of eligible participants is closer to 143,000 and the cost of treating them $1.75 billion.For now, Colorado’s Department of Health Care Policy and Finance has controlled costs by limiting eligibility.  However, ObamaCare mandates that all states extend coverage to this entire population by 2014.  The federal government promises to pay for it by heaping even more debt on our children and grandchildren.Let’s be candid: Medicaid is government-sponsored charity — a noble but costly endeavor.In our family budgets, we may choose to cut back on extras to support worthwhile charities, but we don’t slash basics, like food and shelter for our children, to be even more generous to charitable causes.Given the choice, it’s inconceivable that legislators of either party would slash K-12 funding in order to expand Medicaid, but that’s exactly what’s happened.  And the outlook grows even more grim under ObamaCare.So, why haven’t those who want to raise taxes for education or want the courts to force the legislature to spend more on education taken aim at the chief culprit that’s cutting into education funding? Either they don’t understand how Medicaid is eviscerating the state budget or perhaps they find it more expedient to lock arms with others who want higher taxes to pay for more spending on virtually everything.Two sensible options exist for restoring fiscal sanity to Medicaid:• Lobby Congress to turn Medicaid into a block grant program whereby states receive a lump sum from the federal government and are liberated to design their own program without federal mandates.  Colorado will have allies because 49 other states are in a similar predicament.• Require Medicaid recipients to pay a small premium or co-pay in exchange for the health care they receive — which costs the state about $4,800 per patient per year.Some will object because Medicaid is a safety net program for the poor.  Yet, households with an average income of $17,500 (just below 100% of poverty) spend an average of $879 on junk food and soda pop, $1,160 on eating out and $1,192 on entertainment.If Medicaid patients paid an average of $400 a year out of pocket, the state could add some $300 per student in K-12 funding.So which is more responsible – more cuts to K-12 education or requiring Medicaid customers to help pay for their health care costs by cutting back on a few extras?   Mark Hillman served as Colorado state treasurer and Senate majority leader. He is now the Republican National Committeeman and a Centennial Institute Fellow. To read more or comment, go to www.MarkHillman.com. 

(Centennial Fellow) A month ago, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank excoriated U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., for “sabotage” in the work of the “debt supercommittee.”  The column was vintage Freudian projection, the technical term in psychology for the left’s attributing to its political opponents its own slanderous behavior. (Who will ever forget hearing Bill Clinton whining hypocritically about being a victim of “the politics of personal destruction?”)   As I write, the Congress is again at an impasse, reminding one of the wrangling last August leading to creation of that “supercommittee” — an exercise in nibbling around the edges that may have been designed to fail, as it certainly did. I suggest the supercommittee came into existence only as a hiding place for Members of Congress as they voted to increase the nation's debt ceiling.   Milbank called Kyl, “cold and ruthless … different from you and me.” Those descriptors are inconsistent. Yes, I like being exempted from Milbank’s projection onto Kyl of being cold and ruthless. It was the height of presumption, however, to suggest fairly that Kyl’s work in preventing another compromise on the road to Pres. Obama’s vision for the United States made Kyl different from a great many of us.   About October 30, 2008, candidate Obama proclaimed to his supporters, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”    That had a distinctly ominous ring, given the identities of those few known to have influenced Obama up to that time (e.g., Saul Alinsky, Frank Marshall Davis, Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn).   Sinister is the accurate word today in light of nearly three years’ experience with the Obama presidency, two during which Obama enjoyed the connivance of congressional majorities led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.   Some of us believe the United States of America to be the most successful experiment in world history — a nation exemplifying the exceptionalism so favorably attributed to it by the great Alexis de Tocqueville — and in no need of transformation ala Obama.   The fundamental transformation to statism sought by Obama and his Occupier allies is anathema to a majority of Americans.  There is now a bright line between two camps. Neither can compromise, one must win.   The statist camp of the left has a notable advantage: a visceral commitment to being governors (or dictators, as the case may be). They also have the allegiance of major blocks of voters to whom they continue to pander with public resources.   Therefore, those of us in the camp rejecting statism have the more challenging task. The road back to what our Republic must be is narrow. We simply must do all possible to keep policy-makers between the lines on that narrow road. Those fatuously wringing their hands over failures to “compromise” would help drive us into Obama’s statist ditch.  

  The congressional supercommittee did not have to be Superman, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. The mission was more on the order of being lackadaisical traffic cops. See all those cars going 100 mph? Let's get the accelerator madness down to 96 or 97, OK?  Sorry, but committee members avoided even that duty. The Democrats wanted a ruinous, trillion-dollar, hit-the-rich-hard tax increase as the major part of a $1.2 trillion, relatively picayunish, 10-year deficit reduction in $45 trillion worth of corruptly tinged spending that threatens immediate crisis and long-term suffering.  Think of it as incumbency investment. Every dollar spent helps buy a vote from some constituency or the other. The rich have few votes, and why get serious about slowing down government growth when we can happily imitate the modern-day, near-collapse of Greece? We can also look forward to our struggling children and grandchildren cursing us as the most selfish, freebie-inebriated generation in American history when they have to foot the bill.  The Republicans on the committee were better. They at least favored some halfway meaningful cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the most threatening programs in our budgetary future. And despite the overreach of multiple pledges to avoid any and all new taxes, one brave GOP soul stood tall for tax reform simplifying our system, ending numerous corporate and individual deductions and raising revenue both by boosting the economy and grabbing more money right away through the revisions.  But no deal is not a new deal, and we're not going to be saved by the standby law that mostly skips over the entitlements, says phooey on a strong defense and makes it likely that George W. Bush-era tax decreases will be allowed to perish. That law, referred to as "sequestering," does allow some reductions in Medicare fees paid to doctors and hospitals, meaning health-care providers that do not drop out of Medicare or go out of business will make up the loss by scheduling more appointments, it has been argued. Don't worry about defense because we don't need as much as we have and there's lots of waste out there, some conservatives join liberals in averring. I, myself, think we still live in a dangerous world and have noticed our secretary of defense saying the cuts could make us weaker than in decades. While I am persuaded by experts that our defense structure needs reshaping to better meet current needs, I do not think lower budgets will accomplish that end. And since when does lowering a bureaucracy's budget do away with a bureaucracy's waste?  If the Bush tax cuts go away, the middle class will learn just how significant they were to them, despite prattle to the contrary, and if we get no leadership soon -- agreeing on $4 trillion worth of 10-year cuts in increased spending right away, and more trillions to come -- the recent news of a record $15 trillion debt will seem a sneeze prior to the heart attack.  Sadly, President Barack Obama, having failed at governing, has turned practically full time to the only thing he does well -- campaigning. He has repeatedly turned his back on opportunities to deal with the debt, negotiates mostly through the inoperable techniques of aloofness and lambasting, aims to please the crowd with dangerous, envy-mongering demagoguery, and has been earning the disgust even of devout followers, one of them being ultra-liberal MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews.  "He never tells what he's going to do with regard to reforming our health-care systems, Medicare, Medicaid," Matthews said before a national TV audience. "How is he going to reform Social Security? Is he going to deal with long-term debt? How? Is he going to reform the tax system? How? Just tell us. Why are we in this fight with him? Just tell us, commander, give us our orders and tell us where we're going." My apologies for the Matthews understatement. In addition to offering no leadership, Obama has even pledged to veto steps in the right direction. Many cheer, but more and more, people seem to be catching on.      

('76 Contributor) I just returned from a family reunion in Sioux Falls, SD, the same day Congress raised the debt ceiling.  Family reunions are interesting because a large, extended family represents a statistical sample from which one can infer much of what going on in the World.  It is obvious that young people are struggling, leaving their small towns and migrating to urban areas.  They are taking upwards of 6 years to get their undergraduate degrees and graduate debt-ridden.  The teaching jobs they were encouraged to pursue a decade ago are now few and far between.  Many of the most talented women in the family are pursuing jobs in law and medicine, but one wonders whether disruptive change will really afford them the careers they expect.  This younger generation is anxious.  They cannot begin families without an income and they are hitting the streets with debt and uncertainty. Another group were the males in the 50 year-old, plus group.  Many are unemployed and some have already spent years searching for jobs that have long ago were outsourced or eliminated. Most recently they lost their ability to use their home equity and 401Ks to stay above water and their wives have had to pick up the slack. Their kids have chosen state rather than private colleges.  Mobility and retraining seem all but impossible, so a form of siege mentality has set in. There is one group though, which so far, seems unscathed.  They are retired teachers or have jobs in the public sector.  Even they know that what has happened is not a business cycle, and profound structural changes are around the corner.  It’s as though there is a hurricane in the Gulf and we know it will eventually hit landfall. What is all but impossible to measure is the magnitude and speed of the changes. Recent discussions about the deficits have focused on the $14 trillion dollars in current federal debt.  What this week’s Bloomberg Business Week magazine points out is that there has been is no serious discussion of the looming $211 trillion fiscal gap between government spending and revenues.  Whatever number it adds up to be should give us reason to pause, because every $1 trillion dollars in cutbacks represents 10 million jobs.  It is now abundantly clear that whatever prosperity we enjoyed over the past thirty years was false, propped up by easy credit.  We are now experiencing de-leveraging and we do not know where rock bottom rests. I believe it is now time to acknowledge that we are in the 21st century.   Our lives are about to be transformed the way a caterpillar goes into a cocoon and emerges a butterfly. There will be a disintegration of the old structure. What emerges from the cocoon will barely resemble that old form. We cannot even begin to solve large problems by cutting costs; we must increase revenues. But, the suggestion that we increase revenues by raising taxes is a false choice. We must increase revenues by generating vast new wealth from exports into the global economy.   A new, 21st century economy cannot be manufacturing-based;  it must be based on services such as agriculture technology, water, health care, education, sewer, roads, construction and alternative energy.   These are all things third world countries desperately need and they are things we are very good at doing. The problem is that we just aren’t very efficient at these things because most of these services have been provided by the public sector. They have never been subjected to the disciplining effects of the market economy. For example, we simply cannot let health care become 20% of our GDP and continue to be an overhead item in our economy.  Medicare, Medicaid and health care are the dominant reason we cannot get our government’s fiscal house in order.  Nothing short of a leveling of the playing field will suffice.  If health care were an export industry we would encourage it to be as big as possible. You can go through one-by-one the other areas I outlined and see that significant reform must occur if these industries are to become efficient enough to export their goods and services in a global economy. In many cases we will have to let the old structures die off and replace them with new, incentivized, performance-based, competitive structures.  We didn’t reform the Savings & Loan Associations back in the 1980s—we killed them off and replaced them.  This probably will have to happen with the mortgage industry and retail banking. I for one believe that none of the change needed will happen unless we start with a transformation of our politics.  Recent events in Washington, DC have show how deeply troubled our system is. It is no longer about voting Republican or Democrat.  The bipolar two party system has, by necessity been triangulated by Independents and the Tea Party.  But, a coalition government is too slow to react and we cannot afford to become Italy.  I further assert that any transformation will require the elimination of the dominance of the attorney-turned-politician.  I recognize that singling out a profession is dangerous.  The chokehold this profession has on American politics is,  of late,  counter-productive.  The industrial age resulted in large, hierarchal organizations staffed by specialists.  The lawyer seemed the most general of the group and he was given the job to legislate and govern. In the end, though, the law itself is specialized and a process with more form than substance. Most lawyers do not even take a class in economics. We now need a new generation of generalists and we are going to have to grow them the same way the military breeds generals:  Through training and experience. In the end we are like Alice asking the Mad Hatter which way to go. If you don’t know where you would like to end up, then it doesn’t matter which path to take. We have to decide what kind of a world we want to leave to our children and to what extent we want the rest of the World to enjoy what we have.  

Ken Buck spoke yesterday at a Centennial Institute forum on the federal-level Balanced Budget Amendment.  While Congress debates raising the debt limit yet again, the long-term strength of our economy becomes ever more threatened. Permitting more debt won't bolster our economy.  Only massive spending cuts can re-establish a strong basis for fiscal stability and economic growth.  Substantial cost-cutting can be achieved by not funding desirable but non-essential programs:  some aspects of entitlement programs and Obamacare, some government payrolls, much foreign aid and UN funding, support for multi-language programs.  Purchasing and labor contracts could be canceled or re-negotiated. If we taxpayers run into debt, we can't instruct our bank simply to raise our debt limit.  Instead, we must find ways to cut our spending. It is time for the federal government to face reality.  We need the federal-level Balanced Budget Amendment.

('76 Contributor) Lisa Wirthman writes that Planned Parenthood was bullied in the budget battle (Denver Post, April 15).  Why does a billion dollar organization need a subsidy from U.S. taxpayers?  Rather, Washington is using our tax money to assist a favored special interest group, the sex education and abortion industry.  At the same time, Planned Parenthood has been complicit in statutory rape cases and taken donations with offensive racial overtones. American blacks make up twelve percent of the U.S. population, yet thirty-seven percent of all abortions are performed on black women.  With a black-to-white abortion rate of 3-to-1 nationally, abortion remains what Jesse Jackson called it in the 1970s—black genocide. Abortionists continue their work of tearing off the arms and legs and crushing the heads of babies in the womb at the rate of 3,300 per day. These are our most defenseless citizens.  Why should Planned Parenthood be allowed to bully babies and taxpayers?

('76 Contributor) Question for those of you concerned about the size of federal debts and deficits: Would you endorse a plan which would add another five or six trillion dollars to the federal debt over the next decade while increasing Uncle Sam’s annual expenditures by $1.1 trillion? If so, you’re in luck. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) recently unveiled just such a plan. Naturally, Democrats immediately denounced Ryan’s plan as “radical.” They think the increases in spending and debt should be much larger. It shows how far the goalposts have been moved in American politics that adding multi-trillion-dollars of debt is the most conservative proposal anyone in government has made. How would you like your government debt, Mr. or Ms. Citizen—gargantuan or astronomical? The Ryan Plan, if implemented (more on that in a moment), would cut $179 billion from President Obama’s planned spending in 2012 and another $241 billion in 2013. Why is it not “radical” to raise spending by $787 billion in one year, like Obama did in 2009, but “radical” to propose a decrease of $179 billion? Ryan proposes to reform Medicare and Medicaid so that they don’t bankrupt the country. Why is that demonized as “war on the elderly and poor” (the phraseology of Illinois Democrat Jan Schakovsky), but nobody talks about waging “war on the young” by saddling the rising generation with trillions of dollars of debt? Ryan’s plan is bold in comparison to the status quo in Washington, but it isn’t radical. You want “radical?” How about getting government out of the medical field entirely? Since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, medical costs have soared far beyond the rate of inflation. More than that, market competition has been diminished and fraud and inefficiency have ballooned apace with the growth of these two medical bureaucracies. (Why do liberals rant and rave about the Pentagon’s inefficiencies, but remain silent about the similar inefficiencies of Medicare and Medicaid?) Ryan’s plan is statist to the core, promising seniors large government subsidies with which to choose from a slate of government-regulated health care plans. At this stage, Ryan’s plan is academic. Its combination of spending cuts, tax cuts, and devolution of administration of government programs from the federal to the state level—while a significant improvement over the fiscal insanity of recent years—is dead in the water until at least 2013. If you doubt that, look at the recently concluded “government shutdown” soap opera. The government is going broke, the Republicans were asking for a giveback of less than 10 percent of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid spending increases, but the Democrats—famous for extolling bipartisanship—threatened to shut down the government rather than make such a modest compromise. It will be interesting to see how long Ryan’s fellow Republicans in the House stand by his proposals. The coming vote is largely symbolic. The real test will be when Republicans have to face the voters in close re-election races next year. A majority of Americans may say that they favor reduced federal spending and smaller deficits, but when push comes to shove, how many will vote for a legislator who actually shrinks programs from which voters benefit? Even if Ryan’s plan, by some miracle, were to be enacted, nothing fundamental would change. Uncle Sam will remain a gigantic, meddling nanny, interfering with our lives and progressively eroding our liberty, entangling us in a corrupt network of special privileges that murder justice and bury the rule of law. Ryan’s plan is a futile attempt to square the circle. He is trying to find a way to preserve an inherently flawed system—a democratic transfer society—whereby government somehow takes care of all of us without eventually spending itself into bankruptcy. The Ryan Plan is not radical; that is, it doesn’t get to the root of the problem. It never questions the legitimacy of government redistribution of wealth. The mechanisms, rationale, and justification for Big Government remain unchallenged. Although a significant step in the right direction (i.e., less federal spending), Paul Ryan’s plan ultimately is not a cure for what ails us. Mark Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and fellow for economic and social policy with the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.

(Centennial Fellow) In arguably the most colossal political blunder of the 20th century Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States three days after Pearl Harbor based on his fatal underestimation of America’s prodigious capacity for war production. A dozen years later Dwight Eisenhower wrote that “the greatness of America and its capacity for doing good in the world is inseparably linked to the might of the U. S. economy.” Thirty years later Ronald Reagan launched a massive military build-up believing correctly that he could win the Cold War by breaking the back of a Soviet economy that had no chance of successfully competing with the American economic juggernaut. Since the Second World War Americans have viewed their country’s global dominance and concomitant economic primacy as a constant in world affairs.  They have also seen that economy as a mighty engine that would endlessly elevate the quality of life for each successive generation of Americans. Now in less than three years that mindset has been definitively shattered.  Today- however unwillingly- we must actually contemplate the possibility that our country could go bankrupt and our economy collapse under the weight of heretofore unthinkable debt and deficits.  Perhaps ever more damaging to our collective psyche is the thought that we are ushering in a new Gray Age of American history in which our children and grandchildren will look back on our time as a moment of national fecklessness that led to the death of the American Dream. This bleak scenario arises from a perfect storm of global events most notably the world’s worst economic shocks since 1945 and a new American Administration at once economically clueless and blindly driven by a redistributionist ideology. At a moment when all of Europe is beginning to turn away from the destructive consequences of socialist economics the Obama administration is racing hell bent to embrace it. Just when these baleful trends appeared irreversible there occurred an extraordinary and leaderless popular uprising among the American people.  Some defined it narrowly as the “Tea Party Movement” but it was actually much broader than that as was demonstrated last November in the most stunning mid-term elections in seventy years. The most remarkable aspect of that election occurred not at the national level, but at the base of the American political pyramid.  There Republicans gained nearly 700 state legislative seats- the most they have held since 1928.  The consequences of this startling shift are now being seen in statehouses across the nation – nowhere more visibly than in Madison, Wisconsin. Pundits and Parties alike are yet divided on the meaning of this political earthquake but one truth seems emergent: virtually every American adult understands the relationship between income and expenditure, and that when the latter consistently outpaces the former it is a bad thing.  They also know that just as excessive debt can crush a family, so too it can ruin a nation. At present the two political parties are engaged in a contest to determine which can more skillfully respond to the American people’s convictions regarding income and expenditure. The Democrats- at least those in Washington- are at a disadvantage in defending a President loudly advocating the need for more spending and rhetoric aside showing almost no interest in cutting spending. Republicans who have no history of ever cutting spending are gripped by uncertainty and divided between those determined to make the leap to real spending cuts- including entitlements- and those terrified of being politically savaged by demagoguing Democrats. Though they are most disingenuous in articulating it the Democrats as the historic party of more government believe that large tax increases will at once fix the economy and banish the entitlement nightmare. Though tongue-tied about what and how much to cut- particularly entitlements- Republicans as the party of less government see tax increases as anathema to recovery and believe only dramatic spending cuts can re-energize those market forces that have historically  been the mighty engine of American growth and prosperity. The bet here is that just as governors like Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson, and Michigan’s John Engler built the state laboratories that helped shape the resurgent economy of the Eighties and Nineties, so too will it be Republican governors from the Heartland like, Walker, Daniels, and Kasich who will boldly go where a timid Washington establishment has feared to tread and thereby show the way to rescuing an American economy trembling on the brink of catastrophe.   All Americans should wish them well, for if they and their states fail, it is hard to imagine how our country can succeed. William Moloney’s columns have appeared in the Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Washington Post , and many other outlets.  He is a Fellow of the Centennial Institute. 

Some of the Colorado tax dollars that support higher education follow the student to whatever college he or she chooses to attend, instead of being directed by politicians.  That’s good. But the formula for allocating those College Opportunity Fund dollars (known as the COF stipend) is politically stacked to favor government-run colleges over independent colleges – and that’s not good. It works this way: Suppose the Smith twins, Bob and Barb, graduated last year from East High.  Because Bob chose CU, a government-run college, he got an $1860 boost from the state toward this year’s tuition, via the COF stipend. But Barb’s COF stipend was only worth $930, half of what her brother got, because she chose DU, an independently-run college.  How was that fair?  It wasn’t.  How did it serve the public interest?  It didn’t. Shouldn’t there be a law equalizing educational opportunities for all students who receive the COF stipend?   There should. To establish fairness and serve the public interest, and the Colorado House of Representatives is now considering just such a law.  House Bill 1168 calls for the stipend to be equal in value for every Bob or Barb who gets a Colorado diploma, demonstrates financial need, and enrolls at a participating Colorado campus, whether public or private. The bill is rated at zero fiscal impact, meaning it will not spend a single additional dollar of taxpayer money in these tough budgetary times.  It simply cuts up the existing COF pie into pieces of exactly the same size for all the students who get a stipend. HB-1168 was approved by the House Education Committee on Feb. 28 with a bipartisan 8-5 majority.  It won preliminary approval by the full House on March 11, and faces a final vote in the House the week of March 14.  The bill faces tough hurdles in passing a Democrat-run state Senate and then obtaining Gov. John Hickenlooper’s signature to become law.  But if enough Coloradans signal their support to legislators in both parties and both houses, it could happen. In my opinion, HB-1168 is fundamentally fair in treating all students equally, fiscally responsible in holding spending level, and educationally smart in encouraging a wider diversity of college choices for the sons and daughters of Colorado.  What’s your opinion? Whether you agree or disagree with me, now is the time to make your views known to state representatives and state senators via email, phone, or seeing them in person one day soon. A directory of contact information for all 100 Colorado legislators is here. House & Senate Emails & Phone A fact sheet with more details on House Bill 1168 is here. An economist’s memo on fiscal benefits to the state from equalizing COF stipends is here. 

A second consecutive year of sharp reductions to K-12 education funding in Colorado, proposed Gov. John Hickenlooper's budget, could actually help public schools improve learning performance and break out of a 30-year "Groundhog Day" cycle of ineffectual reforms endlessly repeated.That was the argument by Centennial Institute fellows William Moloney and Krista Kafer at Issue Monday, Feb. 28 in the CCU Beckman Center.  Hear the full podcast of Moloney & Kafer's briefing. [mp3:Issue Monday 2.28.11.mp3]  Moloney was Colorado Education Commissioner, 1997-2007, and has held senior education policy posts in a half-dozen other states and countries.  Kafer directed education policy for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, and is now does quality evaluations for charter schools.The briefing was based on Moloney's Centennial Institute policy brief, Much Better Schools on Much Lower Budgets, published in December 2010 and available here: Centennial Policy Brief No. 2010-2     His fact sheet for Issue Monday is here: Moloney 022811 Education Costs & Results Krista Kafer and Centennial Institute director John Andrews flank former Commissioner William Moloney in the final "lightning round" of school reform questions at Issue Monday, Feb. 28.