Reform Schools Reformed: How Competitive Tendering Saves Your Money

With surging juvenile crime rates and limited budgets, state governments have been hard pressed to handle the increasing demands on the juvenile-justice system. This strain has led to increased privatization of juvenile-corrections services. Once found only on the outer fringes of libertarianism, advocates of privatized corrections are new viewed as being well within the mainstream. […]

No Dice!

On August 12, Governor Glendening announced – firmly – that no bill authorizing slot machines or casinos in Maryland will pass into law under his watch.1 Nonetheless, given the – how shall one say this? – pliancy of various Maryland politicians on this issue, it bears remembering that a day is an age in politics […]

A ‘D’ for the Professor: Maryland\’s Taxing Situation

During Maryland’s last gubernatorial election, Republican Ellen R. Sauerbrey promised deep tax cuts. She pointed to the 30 percent tax cut in New Jersey as a model. The victorious Parris N. Glendening seemed to get the message. After he took office, he called for a five percent to ten percent income-tax cut: a wise economic […]

Benchmarking: Taking Local Government into the 21st Century

The economic uncertainty of our tomorrows necessitates a commitment to preparedness on the part of county and municipal governments successfully to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Sluggish economic growth and reduced federal and state financial assistance, coupled with increased demands for services and public intolerance for additional taxes/fees, underscore the importance and timeliness […]

Montgomery Innovations: Lessons for Baltimore?

One of the education establishment’s defenses of its poor performance (in relation to private and parochial schools) is that non-public schools are selective. That is, private and parochial schools may choose their own students, leaving the most difficult students for the public schools to deal with. This is used as a rationale to justify annual […]

Taking Charge: How Citizens Can Help Kids when Government Won’t

At the same time that Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke (D) was announcing plans to appoint a task force to explore different options for providing school choice for parents, a new group was being chartered in Maryland – a Baltimore version of the Children’s Educational Opportunity Foundation (known as CEO America). Like the original group, […]

Ticket to Ride: Why Baltimore Must Not Raise Income Taxes

The defense first made for Mayor Schmoke’s recent proposal to up the city piggyback income tax was the small average per-person tax increase that would result, less than $75 a year. This is not the point. Baltimore is not a pleasant enough place to live that it can afford to be making any more tax […]

Public v. Private Schools: A Reality Check on the BCPS

So how are vouchers doing?” asks columnist Clarence Page in a March 15 piece in the Baltimore Sun, preposterously titled, “A Reality Check on School Vouchers.” “Unfortunately,” he opines sternly, “the marketplace produces disasters along with miracles.” School choice falls into the former category, apparently. Two — yes, two — of the private schools participating […]

The Brighter Borough: Lessons from Wandsworth, London

Wandsworth is a United Kingdom success story. An inner-city London borough of 260,000 people, it has prospered because its leading council members have retained a clear and focused vision of what good local government means. (American readers should recall that in the U.K., there is no separation of powers for legislative/executive functions. In the Wandsworth […]

Wake Up, Corporate America: How Business Feeds the Mouth that Bites It

The Environmental Law Institute is a tax-exempt organization active in the field of public policy. Among its claims to fame is the legal rationale that allowed Exxon to be held criminally responsible for the Valdez oil spill off Alaska. Every year, astonishingly, the Environmental Law Institute receives a grant – generally around $5,000 – from […]