As I wrote last week, I had a bad feeling that President Obama would turn to education bribe — er — “reform” after last Tuesday’s bombshell election, and it seems I was right to be afraid — very afraid. It’s an area where Republicans have been all too happy over the last decade or so to let big government in despite its undeniable record of failure, and it will give the President a terrific chance to look like a new, “bipartisan” man. Fortunately, many progressive Democrats dislike extremely intrusive federal education laws like No Child Left Behind, so while the battle lines over what the president is likely to propose for K‑12 education will probably be different than we’ve seen over the last year, hopefully the opposition will be just as strong. And when it comes to some efforts Mr. Obama is likely to highlight in higher education — even more federal spending and a complete takeover of student lending — Republicans will likely offer much more unified resistance. In other words, fighting the awful proposals we’re likely to hear about in tonight’s State of the Union won’t be easy, but it won’t be impossible, either.

• Cato experts will live-blog Obama’s State of the Union Address tonight. Join in, submit questions, and watch the speech right here on Cato@Liberty at 9:00 PM EST.

• A quick, ten-point libertarian State of the Union Address.

• One “Great Canard”: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argues that the Fed’s monetary policy was not responsible for the U.S. housing bubble.

• About that non-discretionary spending…

• Podcast: “Obama’s Fiscal Right Fake” featuring Chris Edwards.

According to the Washington Post, “President Obama will propose a major increase in funding for elementary and secondary education for the coming year in Wednesday’s State of the Union address.” This, “senior White House aides said… fits into a broader effort by the administration to focus scarce resources on the nation’s long-term economic health.”

Give kids a better education and they’ll be more successful when they ultimately enter the workforce. Sounds plausible enough. And if you dig into the scholarly research you find that, lo and behold, it’s actually true. Nations that improve student achievement the most end up with faster economic growth.

But that leaves us with one important question: does higher government education spending raise academic achievement? At the risk of stepping on Ross Perot’s toes, let’s pull out the charts.

The first chart, below, shows the relationship between federal spending (adjusted for inflation) and the academic achievement of 17-year-olds since 1970. [The final years of high school are the decisive ones in this case, because we want to know how well our k‑12 system has prepared kids for college and the workforce.]

At first blush, there doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between federal spending and student achievement–and so it looks like President Obama is barking up the wrong tree from a policy standpoint. But what if state and local education spending have been falling just as federal spending has been rising, nullifying its effects? After all, we read every day in the newspaper about how public schools are starved for funds. So our next chart tooks at total expenditures per pupil and student achievement:

Hmm. As we see here, total expenditures per pupil are nearly two-and-a-half times higher today than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, while student achievement toward the end of high school has been flat or has even declined slightly (in science).

You may be wondering: “What did we get for that huge increase in spending?” The answer is: a lot more public school employees. The next chart adds an extra trend line to the one above: the number of public school employees divided by the number of students enrolled. This ratio of staff to students has gone up by 70 percent since 1970, swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions to about 4.5 million people.

What can we conclude from the above charts? By calling for a big increase in government education spending as a way to boost the U.S. economy, the president is doubling down on a bet that has already been lost, repeatedly, by his predecessors. Love isn’t the only thing money can’t buy. It can’t buy you an improved public school system either. And by extension, higher government education spending won’t buy you a better economy.

If the president goes ahead with his plan to spend billions more on public schooling, he’ll be driving this country deeper into dept for no good reason at all… unless of course you consider swelling the ranks of the public school employee unions a good reason.

While my colleagues are live-blogging President Obama’s speech right here tonight, I’ll be talking about the speech both before and afterward with Neal Cavuto and John Stossel on the Fox Business Network.

You have a computer AND a television; you can watch both.

1. Abandon Obamacare

2. Forget Cap and Trade

3. Reject the Card Check Bill

4. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan

5. Legalize Drugs

6. Scrap the tax code and replace with a flat tax

7. Expand free trade and immigration

8. Stop the bailouts

9. Cut spending

10. Cut spending

BONUS — Cut spending

• How the right has ‘Avatar’ wrong: “At its core, the movie is about defending property rights — something conservatives should embrace.”

• Americans tuning out the State of the Union: “When Obama had to make way for ‘Lost,’ some lamented the fact that many Americans preferred trash TV over presidential enlightenment. But the public’s lack of interest in the SOTU is actually a sign of political health.”

• Why the health care takeover failed.

• Obama’s “mini-me” plan for health care.

• Podcast: “U.S. Should Cash Out of Social Security” featuring Michael D. Tanner.

In The New York Review of Books, oncologist and author Jerome Groopman delivers a stunning rebuke to those in the Obama administration (read: OMB director Peter Orszag) who think the federal government can improve health care quality by telling doctors how to practice medicine:

in the Senate health care bill…Doctors and hospitals that follow “best practices,” as defined by government-approved standards, are to receive more money and favorable public assessments. Those who deviate from federal standards would suffer financial loss and would be designated as providers of poor care…

Over the past decade, federal “choice architects”—i.e., doctors and other experts acting for the government and making use of research on comparative effectiveness—have repeatedly identified “best practices,” only to have them shown to be ineffective or even deleterious.

For example, Medicare specified that it was a “best practice” to tightly control blood sugar levels in critically ill patients in intensive care. That measure of quality was not only shown to be wrong but resulted in a higher likelihood of death when compared to measures allowing a more flexible treatment and higher blood sugar. Similarly, government officials directed that normal blood sugar levels should be maintained in ambulatory diabetics with cardiovascular disease. Studies in Canada and the United States showed that this “best practice” was misconceived. There were more deaths when doctors obeyed this rule than when patients received what the government had designated as subpar treatment (in which sugar levels were allowed to vary).

That’s just one of many examples Groopman offers of where government planners have gone awry. He concludes:

Ironically, the failure of experts to recognize when they overreach can be explained by insights from behavioral economics…

The care of patients is complex, and choices about treatments involve difficult tradeoffs. That the uncertainties can be erased by mandates from experts is a misconceived panacea, a “focusing illusion.”

Come to think of it, Groopman makes much the same case as I did in my article, “Pay-for-Performance: Is Medicare a Good Candidate?” (Yale J. Health P. Law & Ethics, Vol. 7, issue 1: Winter 2007): evidence-based medicine is essential, but variation in disease burden and patient preferences (read: values) makes it impossible for central planners to define quality accurately.

Read the whole thing.