Michael Barone‘s latest contribution to the Washington Examiner offers some suggestions to Republicans who seek good policy proposals:
One possible area is education, where 1990s reforms and the Bush education law have encountered strong institutional resistance from teachers unions and education schools. Manzi, citing models in Sweden and the Netherlands, calls for “the creation of a real marketplace among ever more deregulated publicly financed schools — a market in which funding follows students, and far broader discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools.”
Democrats are prevented by their teacher union paymasters from pursuing such goals seriously; witness their battle to kill a small school voucher program in the District of Columbia. Republicans could do much better, starting at the state level and daring the Obama administration to stop them in Washington.
Another possibility is pro-family tax reform. The post-World War II tax regime, with its big dependent deductions, produced the equivalent of a generous children’s allowance for married parents. Republicans should try to tilt tax policy in the same direction again.
Those who attended Barone’s last John Locke Foundation Headliner speech will remember that he also pushed policy ideas that would appeal to young voters.
