Unfortunately, we don’t have great advantage of having Milton Friedman with us during the present “blame the free market” storm that is raging in Washington. Still, it’s nice to have clips of this champion in action.

Libby Quaid, the Associated Press’s intrepid DC education correspondent, has just broken the biggest education story of the year to date: Education Secretary Arne Duncan opposes congressional Democrats’ efforts to kick kids out of the DC voucher program and back into the public schools.

While Duncan said he opposes vouchers, he added that, “D.C. is a special case,” saying that “kids already going to private schools on the public dime should be allowed to continue.”

I confess, I’m surprised by even the qualified support for DC vouchers expressed by Duncan — surprised, and delighted. From the sound of it, though, Duncan is suggesting only that existing participants be grandfathered into the program, not that any additional children should be allowed to join them.

And Duncan makes a misstep when he implies that school choice can only “help a handful of children.”

Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and a host of other nations have large school choice programs already. The Dutch program is nearly a century old and private schools enroll nearly three quarters of the student population. As for Duncan’s desire to create new schools that will serve whole neighborhoods, he need only visit Milwaukee to see the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been invested in creating new private schools in some of the most depressed parts of the city, thanks to that city’s private school choice program.

School choice is not only good for kids and communities, it’s good for taxpayers. The government of Florida’s own accountability office reported last year that its statewide k‑12 education tax credit program is saving $1.50 for every dollar it costs to operate.

Will Duncan’s comment rescue the voucher program from Senate Democrats who are set to vote on the bill in question this week? Stay tuned.

President Obama has promised to make spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more transparent during his term. That’s a step in the right direction, says Christopher A. Preble, director of foreign policy studies, but have Americans looked at the true cost of the wars the nation is fighting?

In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Preble examines the price the United States has paid for the past six years of war.

The costs of maintaining a US presence in Iraq through the end of 2011…will continue to be quite substantial. We’re spending on the order of $10 to $12 billion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined each month.…The costs in terms of dollars will continue to be quite high.

Preble is the author of a forthcoming book, The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free, now available for pre-order.

Here’s a new list of bloggers who are citing, discussing and writing about Cato commentary and analysis:

• The Economist blog “Democracy in America” comments on Gene Healy’s DC Examiner op-ed about the rise of executive power.
• On Overton’s Arrow, Carl Oberg cites Doug Bandow’s Cato@Liberty post about the Congressional Budget Office’s prediction that the Obama stimulus plan will ultimately make the country worse off economically.
• Freedom’s Lighthouse posted a video of Daniel J. Mitchell’s commentary about British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the White House.
• Glob​al​Warm​ing​.org editor William Yeatman discusses Tuesday’s Cato Daily Podcast with Patrick J. Michaels on climate change.
• Aristotle the Geek examines Paul Krugman’s critique of a 2007 Cato Tax & Budget Bulletin about Iceland’s flat tax.
• Brian Doherty reviews Gene Healy’s book, Cult of the Presidency at The Freeman Online.

If you’re blogging about Cato, let us know on Twitter (@catoinstitute) or email cmoody@​cato.​org.

Wow, a bipartisan effort to actually do something about government waste. From the Washington Post today:

A bill to end cost overruns in major weapons systems would create a powerful new Pentagon position — director of independent cost assessments — to review cost analyses and estimates, separately from the military branch requesting the program.

divThose reviews, unlike in the current process, would take place at key points in the acquisition process before a weapons program can proceed, according to legislation sponsored by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D‑Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R‑Ariz.)

This seems like a step forward, but cost overruns are a big problem across the entire federal government, not just at the Pentagon. Federal financial management of energy, highway, and computer projects has been appalling, for example. I’ve written about this here and elsewhere.

The government needs to buy weapons, and so we should try to improve the Pentagon process as best we can. However, the federal government does not need to buy highways, airports, air traffic control computers and many other things that have chronic cost overruns. Those items should be privatized.

Spouse out of work? Can’t keep up private tuition for the kids? Try homeschooling:

Christopher Klicka of Warrenton, Va., senior counsel for the Home School Legal Defense Association and co-teacher along with his wife of seven homeschooled children, says hard times enhance homeschooling’s appeal as private school tuition becomes unaffordable and some public schools contemplate cutbacks.

“People are looking to homeschooling as an alternative more now in light of economic circumstances,” he said, citing its low cost and potential for strengthening family bonds.

At Allendale Academy in Clearwater, Fla., which provides resources for homeschoolers, enrollment has risen 50 percent over the past two years to about 900 students as families desert private schools, says academy director Patricia Carter.

“Often one parent has been laid off,” she said. “That makes private school tuition impossible, and they don’t want to send their kids back to public school.”

Her academy charges $65 per year to support students through 8th grade, $95 for high school students, compared to private school tuitions often running many thousands of dollars per year.

For frugal families, homeschooling can be a good fit. Used academic material is available at low cost; free research resources are on tap on the Internet and at libraries.

The airwaves and Intertubes are filled with images of this bridge in Missouri – the first transportation project in the nation to be funded through the stimulus bill signed by president Obama last month. In their coverage of this project, the media uniformly point to the jobs it has created for local workers, and neglect to reflect on its economic costs.

As Doug Bandow pointed out in his earlier post, even Congress’s own Budget Office expects the stimulus to shrink our economy in the long term. And the CBO’s analysis is arguably too rosy, neglecting the crucial psychological effect of Washington’s unprecedented spending spree on American consumers.

An NBC/WSJ public opinion poll found in January that “60 percent say they’re concerned that the government will spend too much money in trying to stimulate the economy, ultimately increasing the size of the debt.” That’s up from 57 percent who were already terrified by Bailout Mania back in November of 2008. What do people do when they’re scared about the state of the economy? They. Stop. Spending.

Supporters of bailouts and “stimuli” imagine that they can overcome consumers’ tight-fistedness in the short term, but they fail to realize that each new lavish increase in federal spending makes taxpayers more nervous about their ability to repay the ballooning federal debt and about the future of the U.S. economy. So while the Bridge to Your Wallet may have created a handful of local construction jobs in Missouri, it is almost certainly costing many others around the nation.

Cautious taxpayers look at that bridge project, at the mind-boggling accumulation of federal bailouts and stimuli and the biggest federal budget in history, and they cancel major purchases and family vacations. They eat at home instead of supporting their local restaurants. They do exactly the opposite of what the president and Congress are expecting.

If the media insist on doing more stories about the Bridge to Your Wallet, they should look at the polling and spending data showing how Washington’s spending spree is scaring the public into spending less — defeating the very purpose of the stimulus. They should interview restaurant and hotel owners and ask them just how economically stimulated they feel at the moment.