I just got back from a trip to Argentina, where Peronist President Cristina Kirchner announced a proposal to nationalize private pensions. This is theft on a grand scale—the assets are worth about $30 billion—at a time when government spending has skyrocketed and the possibility of yet another official default next year has increased. There is plenty to criticize about the populist regime’s latest moves, but in a 1973 speech, none other than Juan Perón emphatically condemns the nationalization of private pensions, calling it “theft” and referring to public pension systems as generally “inefficient” and “unsafe.” He describes a previous episode in Argentina when a government in need of money nationalized private pensions and depleted workers’ retirement funds, using them for other purposes. It was an “assault.” For those of you who understand Spanish, see the video that has caught Kirchner by surprise:

This is the time of the season for being fed up with politics and not least, of course, with the presidential election. (Actually, I reached that point a while ago). Part of my frustration comes from the candidates who appear willing to say anything, no matter how unrealistic, to win the White House. But part of my frustration lies also with the media who don’t hold the candidates to any standards that might inform voters who care enough to read and listen. This is all the more so since we are experiencing a financial crisis that elicits nothing more from the candidates than a promise “to fix the economy,” whatever that might mean. Shouldn’t the media demand more on our behalf?

Writing for a new blog from The Media Institute, Patrick Maines helps makes sense of my frustration. He points out that the media are following their practice of covering the financial crisis (and the presidential election) like a horse race. Yes, the crisis is helping Obama, but is that the most important thing to know right now? Maines writes:

The stark fact is that the national news media have underreported and misreported virtually every important aspect of our national nightmare: how we got into it, how we can prevent it from happening again, and, most importantly, how we can escape its worst effects now — and how our national leaders can help us.

Maines’ criticism is apt and convincing. The Media Institute, the home of the blog, works on free speech issues and receives substantial support from media companies. Of course, free speech does not necessarily mean good or even useful speech. But the answer to such shortcomings is more speech as Maines proves in his post.

I am intrigued that Maines criticizes the media, a pretty independent stance when you think about it. This blog bears watching as we head into a new administration that seems likely to offer many challenges to freedom of speech.

The Washington Post reports today that the bad economy is forcing budget cuts for the Fairfax County school district. The cuts could include “no cost-of-living raise for teachers, an increase in class size and elimination of such services as busing to centers for gifted and talented students.”

Consider the fact that Fairfax spends around $16,000 on every student (when you add the goodies they leave out), I’d say it’s about time for a more efficient use of funds.

But if the school district really wants to save big bucks for taxpayers and not even have to increase class size or freeze teacher pay, there’s a sure-fire way: education tax credits.

The median tuition at a private school only runs around $4,500. If Virginia allowed tax credits for education, they could save more than $10,000 or every student who switched from public to private school.

A recent Cato fiscal analysis showed that 5 different states could each save billions with a robust education tax credit program.

Maybe Virginia policymakers should turn their attention from haphazard emergency budget cuts to a system of school choice that brings a massive and systemic increase in efficiency and improves education at the same time.

New York governor David Paterson’s top aide, Charles J. O’Byrne, has been forced to resign after revelations that he failed to pay his federal and state income taxes for five years. He owed some $300,000.

His attorney, Richard Kestenbaum, explained that O’Byrne suffered from “non-filer syndrome,” which “causes them not to be able to file their tax returns.” A spokesman for the governor, however, said he has not actually been diagnosed with what she called “late-filers syndrome.”

We often note that you could have read it in Cato Institute publications before it hit the mainstream media. In this case, we hate to think that O’Byrne and his lawyer might have gotten the idea from us. But in fact you can find it in law journals as far back as 1994.

If this syndrome ever gets listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, it’s going to be more popular than ADD.

The power of the Colin Powell endorsement is much exaggerated.

Last Friday, Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin offered a federal policy prescription for disabled students: more choice for parents, tens of billions of new spending on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and some unspecified “reforming and refocusing.”

The Constitution affords the federal government no authority to determine how children are educated, apart from ensuring equal protection of the laws. A political party that accepted the limited, enumerated powers accorded to the federal government by the Constitution would not have a legislative agenda on this subject, other than rolling back unconstitutional laws already on the books. But, given that no such party exists at present, let’s consider this proposal.

McCain/​Palin want to tie existing federal IDEA funding to individual students rather than to the districts that currently serve them, so that parents could take the money to a private school of their choice. Ideally, according to Palin, they’d want the state funding to follow the children, too (as in Florida’s McKay voucher program for disabled students), but it seems they would leave that decision up to the states. This is a better idea than any alternative IDEA reform offered in the past few decades.

The idea of “fully funding” IDEA is, however, one of the worst ideas of the past few decades. There are two problems with IDEA. First, it is not clear how much it helps disabled children. Studies of student performance before and after they enter IDEA programs show little if any benefit. Second, the law has led to a wholesale labeling of perfectly healthy children as “disabled” simply because the public school system has failed to teach them how to read.

Today, just under 3 million American kids are classified as suffering from “Specific Learning Disabilities,” a condition defined in law as reading performance below the level expected for a child of the given age and intelligence. An obvious deficiency in this definition is that it encompasses children who have not been properly taught to read, and have not managed to pick up the skill on their own. Many public school systems, thanks to their infatuation with “whole language” instruction and their resistance to structured synthetic phonics, have difficulty teaching many non-disabled children to read. These 3 million “SLD” children represent more than 40 percent of the entire population of students classified as disabled under the IDEA.

Fully funding IDEA without first addressing its recipe for rampant overdiagnosis will likely make this problem much, much worse.

A real solution would be the spread of large-scale school choice programs at the state level, which would allow all families to easily choose a public or private school for their children. As more families migrated to the private sector, and all schools were forced to compete, ineffective reading instruction methods would be discarded as competitive liabilities, saving millions of children from being exposed to them.

According to the New York Times, Sen. John McCain

stepped up his criticism of the Bush administration by pounding the lectern and demanding that the government support his plan to buy troubled mortgages from homeowners. “And why isn’t the Treasury secretary ordering them to do that?” Mr. McCain asked.

And then he went on:

“We finally learned what Senator Obama’s economic goal is. As he told Joe the Plumber in Ohio, he wants to, quote, ‘spread the wealth around.’ He believes in redistributing the wealth, not in policies that grow our economy and create jobs and opportunities for all Americans. Senator Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie.”

“Socialist!” someone in the crowd yelled.

Presumably the listener yelled “Socialist!” after McCain’s gibe at Obama’s “spread the wealth” plan, but it’s possible that the writing was a little sloppy and the charge actually came in response to McCain’s demand that the federal government buy up mortgages.