President-elect Obama’s prescriptions for improving the economy through wads of new federal spending struck me as tired and insipid, yet further evidence that the next administration is not going to be one buzzing with new ideas. To put it mildly. The CHANGE! we have been so endlessly promised is looking like an attempt to pump air into flat, stale, worn-out nostrums.
A computer in every classroom, for example. That sounded great thirty years ago; but there has been considerable research on the subject since, and the educational results are … questionable. Here is a 2000 report from Heritage on the subject. If anything more conclusive has appeared since, I missed it.
This is not even to mention the fact that much manufacturing of basic computer components like the motherboard (“mobo” in industry jargon) is done abroad, mainly in the Far East. There are around 50 million schoolkids in the U.S.A. If each one is to get a $1,000 computer, that’s $50 billion of federal money, some large portion of it adding to the U.S. trade deficit.
Has this stuff really been thought through? Is thinking-through a thing the new administration intends to do? Or are we just to be serenaded with familiar old tunes from the “progressive” songbook for the next four years?
The leading indicator here will be Head Start, the grandaddy of all no-demonstrated-benefit feelgood “progressive” boondoggles. If we start hearing about Head Start, we’ll know that this new team doesn’t have an idea among them that’s less than thirty years old.