I hereby award the first annual “Breakstone Dog” award to John Hood, for dogged persistence in an argument he should have conceded, lacking the economic expertise to pursue the debate with Roy further on economic grounds.

The “Breakstone Dog” refers to the star of the Breakstone cottage cheese commercial, which features a Benji-type canine attached at the pant leg to the dairyman or homeowner promoting the product. Who knows why this dog won’t let go?

As for the voucher issue, which started this whole debacle, I favor John’s first case suggestion, to means-test the public provision of funds for vouchers (at very least) in education. This will certainly open wide the door for more private funding of scholarships and vouchers. This can arguably result in fewer poverty-stricken kids consigned to the morass of monopoly public education that now exists.

I wish that the optimism that public education could actually be reformed without pulling the dollar plug was warranted. The increasingly centrally-planned trend of No Child Left Behind, and the movement toward a national curriculum as embodied in the National Assesment of Educational Progress and the SAT, bodes ill for that result.