PAINTING REALITY - the official - (by IEPEart)
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On average, urban and intercity rail projects run over budget by 45 percent, roads by 20 percent, and bridges and tunnels by 34 percent.
— Too Many Public Works Built on Rosy Scenarios: Virginia Postrel - Bloomberg
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When it comes to the K-12 education system, we’re living in an age of brutal optimism about testing. Low test scores tell us nothing about a child, we’d like to think, but nearly everything about his school and teachers. Every child in America, after all, is supposed to reach “proficiency” in reading and math by spring 2014, at least according to No Child Left Behind. If any individual child fails, it won’t be because he is disabled, poor, hungry, homeless, can’t understand English, or maybe just isn’t that smart, but because he’s been failed by “the system”—those same bad-apple teachers and principals who cheat, or who are just too damn incompetent or lazy to teach their students.
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Though the subsidy payments always ebbed and flowed with crop prices, many economists are convinced that what is happening now is different. A fundamental upward shift in crop prices is creating the real possibility that Midwestern farmers won’t ever again qualify for the primary form of farm subsidy
