Daily Policy Digest
| The Job Market: Is College Overrated? Colleges have turned out more than a quarter of a million education degrees annually since 2000, despite estimates that only 539,100 teaching positions will be available between 2010 and 2020, says Pamela Villarreal, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis... |
| The Wages of Sin Taxes Many sin taxes are on goods with inelastic prices, meaning that as the price goes up, demand does not change, disproportionately affecting low-income consumers... |
| Hospitals Chase Medicare Performance-Based Bonuses A 2008 study of Massachusetts doctors revealed that doctors who receive incentives to improve the overall health of their patients saw no better results than doctors who received no bonuses... |
| Public Expenditure Fails to Improve Labor Productivity Higher levels of productive public expenditure by city governments have no statistically significant impact on labor productivity in the manufacturing sector... |
| Genetically Modified Rice Will Help Vitamin Deficient Children "Golden rice" is modified to have higher vitamin A content and could be a benefit to the 3 billion people who depend on rice as their staple food... |
| The Impending Decline of Coal Over the last decade, net coal-fired electricity generation decreased 10 percent, while natural gas-fired generation increased 50 percent... |
| Struggling Post Office Scraps Saturday Service The U.S. Postal Service projects that eliminating Saturday service will save roughly $2 billion annually by reducing the need for mail carriers on Saturday... |
| Federal Grant to Battery Cell Maker Squandered An Obama administration grant for a South Korean advanced battery maker to scale up production in the United States did not yield any results despite $142 million in funding... |
| The Rising Cost of Teachers' Health Care For single health insurance coverage, employer costs for private-sector employees are 82 percent of those for teachers... |
| Green Energy Push Harmful to the Economy The electricity that is produced from natural gas is 43 percent the cost of solar power, 68 percent the cost of wind power and 57 percent the cost of biomass... |
