Nevada now requires 600 hours of training to paint fingernails
And 900 hours if you want to apply makeup.
Another law that takes effect today requires more training for students who enter nail technology or aesthetic schools.These are examples of regulations that kill entrepreneurship and drive up costs for these services. Who, aside from nanny staters, would be in favor of these laws? People currently in these professions. As this ReasonTV video shows, the higher the barrier to entry - all in the name of public safety, of course - the more they can charge and the more secure their jobs are.
Vincent Jimno, executive director of the state Board of Cosmetology, said the additional training is needed for infection control. The training will be increased from 500 to 600 hours for new nail technologists, formerly called manicurists.
The training for aestheticians will increase from 600 to 900 hours. These are skin specialists who do such things as smoothing the facial skin.
Read moreDogma vs. what works
In the Las Vegas Sun, Jon Ralston writes, "But both Rory Reid and [Brian] Sandoval have abandoned any pretense that they want to pay teachers more or infuse any money into one of - if not the - most pathetically funded states in the country."
Because Reid and Sandoval, the two major candidates for governor, want to hold teachers and administrators accountable (and make it easier to get rid of ineffective teachers and administrators) and give students a choice in where they are educated, Ralston believes that this election is really about "conservative vs. very conservative" ideas.
Although Ralston seems to be one of the few people who recognize the similarities between the candidates' plans, he misses the big picture. First, how much you spend matters less than how effectively you spend it. Second, our public education system is broke and it needs a major overhaul. Third, yes, there are such things as bad teachers; the sad thing is we can't get rid of them. Finally, school choice works.
Let's begin.
1) Nevada's education spending ranks anywhere from 26th to 47th (using figures from the U.S. government) depending on which expenditures you include and how you calculate the numbers. But does this matter?
No. Between 1959 and 2007, Nevada increased public education spending by 180 percent per pupil - and yes, that is after adjusting for inflation (but doesn't include capital costs and debt repayment). Even with this 180 percent more money per pupil, no one in his or her right mind would argue that the quality of education today is better than 50 years ago.
In fact, almost no respected researcher argues that spending more money improves student achievement.
The National Working Group on Funding Student Learning, an assembly of several education researchers including professors from Washington, Wisconsin, Vanderbilt, Penn State, Stanford and U.C. Berkeley (hardly a bastion of conservative thought) reached a consensus that "the connection between resources and learning has been growing weaker, not stronger," and that "...the system itself is the problem ... State education finance systems were not designed with student learning in mind ..."
And much more evidence suggests that there is no correlation between spending more money and improving student achievement.
Don't forget, it is widely recognized that teachers in Nevada are paid quite well relative to other states (ranking anywere from 17th to 22nd highest). Not that paying teachers more helps. According to Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, authors of "Teacher Quality and Teacher Pay," increasing the pay of teachers does not attract higher-quality teachers to the profession - school districts simply spent more money on the same pool of teachers.
2) Reid and Sandoval are right: Public education in Nevada is broken. We have dismal math and reading scores, rank fourth-worst in drop-out rate and are last in the nation in graduation rates. Fewer than half of low-income, black and Hispanic children can read at grade level, according to the NAEP fourth-grade reading exam. According to Education Week, fewer than one-third of African-Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans will graduate on time with a standard high school diploma in the Silver State.
Why are our results so bad? The major reason is that Nevada's public education system is an unaccountable, bureaucratic monopoly that focuses on jobs for adults, not education for students. I'm not alone in this judgment. The School Finance Redesign Project at the University of Washington, Bothel, concluded that public education is "focused on maintaining programs and paying adults, not on searching for the most effective way to educate our children."
3) Both candidates want to reform teacher evaluations, teacher seniority and teacher tenure. Doing so will help ensure we get bad teachers out of classrooms.
The National Council on Teacher Quality notes that Nevada is a state where earning tenure is "virtually automatic." Few higher-ed teachers, by contrast, actually receive tenure, and even then it takes five or more years to earn the privilege. Tenure makes it hard to get rid of really bad teachers.
According to the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank (read: NOT CONSERVATIVE), and the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, Nevada's school districts terminated or failed to renew the contracts of just 0.2 percent of "untenured teachers" and 0.3 percent of "tenured teachers" in 2007-08. Overall, Nevada kept 99.4 percent of its teachers that year. Only Arkansas, Delaware and Pennsylvania fired fewer teachers.
If getting rid of bad teachers and implementing teacher evaluations, eliminating seniority privileges and tenure is such a conservative idea, then why would U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan say, "[w]hen inflexible seniority and rigid tenure rules that we designed put adults ahead of children - then we are not only putting kids at risk, we are putting the entire education system at risk." Yup, Arne Duncan: NOT A CONSERVATIVE.
Furthermore, Whitney Tilson of Democrats for Education Reform (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) identifies "three pillars of mediocrity" that must be eliminated: a) Lifetime tenure, b) lockstep pay and c) seniority (instead of merit).
4) School choice isn't a conservative issue, either. It's an education issue. Partisans have made it into an ideological issue solely because one major source of campaign funding - the teacher unions - hates school choice. More choice for parents and students means less opportunity for unions to control and manipulate education policy and, thus, fewer opportunities to fatten their own pockets.
Howard Fuller, a former Black Panther and current professor at Marquette University (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) has stated: "There is a fundamental issue confronting African Americans, and therefore all Americans. Parents without the power to make educational choices lack an indispensable tool for helping their children secure an effective education."
Anthony Colón, a former vice president of La Raza (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE) has stated: "Vouchers are not a Republican idea. If your community is underperforming with low graduation rates and sits at the bottom of the barrel in math and science, you don't worry about vouchers being a Republican issue. You worry about what works for your community."
Senator James T. Meeks, a Democrat from inner-city Chicago (read: NOT A CONSERVATIVE), not only pushed for a voucher program for low-income children in Chicago, but when the union was angered by his efforts he wrote the union a check and returned its campaign donations.
And don't forget the crowd that marched in Florida to expand the Step Up for Students program.
Or the crowd that marched on D.C. to protest the Democrats' union-backed and ideologically driven attempt to kill a voucher program that works.
Note, Connecticut Independent Joe Lieberman and California Democrat Dianne Feinstein (Read: NOT CONSERVATIVES) have tried to bring back the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Speaking of what works, how about the evidence that vouchers work? Nine out of 10 empirical studies find that students benefit from the use of vouchers to attend private schools. Eighteen out of 19 studies find that public schools improve when faced with voucher competition. In 2009, a U.S. Department of Education study found that students using the D.C. voucher to attend a private school over a three-year period saw an 18-month gain in reading skills, while a 2010 report found that students using the scholarship to attend a private school saw graduation rates that were 21 percentage points higher than the control group.
It is very, very clear that vouchers improve student achievement, graduation rates and public schools. It is also clear that competition between public schools as well as public school choice improve student achievement.
Researcher Carolyn Hoxby of Stanford University found that charter schools in New York improved student achievement in reading and mathematics, especially among low-income children. Importantly, Hoxby's research shows that the charter schools closed the achievement gap significantly. Additionally, Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, found that traditional public schools improved when faced with competition from charter schools.
Even the union-run but autonomous Pilot Schools in Boston outperformed the traditional government monopoly school. Choice and school decentralization work. Period.
If Jon Ralston really does believe we need to spend more money on education, then he is advocating what doesn't work. Ralston is completely wrong in his assessment of Reid vs. Sandoval. Painting empirically proven education policies as ideologically driven dogma is not only incorrect, it is a disservice to the students of Nevada who deserve a much better education. Reid vs. Sandoval on education policy isn't "conservative vs. very conservative" ... it is "what works vs. what works."
New Las Vegas firefighter contract proposal includes a (smaller) raise
Hard times in the private sector: 14 percent unemployment and companies reducing bonuses, benefits and even base pay.
Hard times for Las Vegas firefighters: Smaller pay increases, slightly reduced benefits, no layoffs and a guarantee the city won't privatize ambulance services for at least two years. And the average firefighter is already making over $123,000 in salary (with overtime) and over $174,000 including benefits.
From the RJ, here are some of the details.
· Eliminate a cost-of-living raise. The previous contract called for a cost-of-living raise of 3.5 percent.So while the private sector experiences record unemployment, Las Vegas firefighters - who made on average over $174,000 last year - will continue to receive pay raises.
· Reduce step increases by half in the next two budget years and cut the starting salary of new employees by 5 percent. Step raises average about 5.6 percent. A city firefighter's base pay now is $44,947 to $77,602 a year.
· Eliminate the uniform allowance of $1,500 a year for 2011, an expected savings of $900,000.
· Reduce the city's medical contribution to $360 per pay period, down from $450 per pay period. The contribution will be in only 24 pay periods instead of 26. [Emphasis added]
Just another thing to keep in mind the next time local governments want more of your money.
Breitbart offers $100,000 for full JournoList archive
I love Andrew Breitbart.
[I]n the interests of journalistic transparency, and to offer the American public a unique insight in the workings of the Democrat-Media Complex, I'm offering $100,000 for the full "JournoList" archive, source fully protected. Now there's an offer somebody can't refuse.If you aren't familiar with JournoList, read Michael Calderone's background story.
Yes, the mainstream media that came together to play up the false allegations that the "N-Word" was hurled 15 times by Tea Party participants at the Congressional Black Caucus outside the Capitol the day before the "Obamacare" vote, is the same MSM that colluded to make sure the American public accepted the smear, and refused to show the exculpatory videos that disproved the incendiary charges of Tea Party racism.
Ezra Klein's "JournoList 400" is the epitome of progressive and liberal collusion that conservatives, Tea Partiers, moderates and many independents have long suspected and feared exists at the heart of contemporary American political journalism. ...
The "JournoList" is the story: who was on it and which positions of journalistic power and authority do they hold? Now that the nature and the scope of the list has been exposed, I think the public has a right to know who shapes the big media narratives and how. ...
Like a ventriloquist's dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was Klein's "JournoList." ...
The fact that 400 journalists did not recognize how wrong their collusion, however informal, was shows an enormous ethical blind spot toward the pretense of impartiality. As journalists actively participated in an online brainstorming session on how best to spin stories in favor of one party against another, they continued to cash their paychecks from their employers under the impression that they would report, not spin the agreed-upon "news" on behalf of their "JournoList" peers.
The American people, at least half of whom are the objects of scorn of this group of 400, deserve to know who was colluding against them so that in the future they can better understand how the once-objective media has come to be so corrupted and despised.
We want the list of journalists that comprised the 400 members of the "JournoList" and we want the contents of the listserv. Why should Weigel be the only person exposed and humiliated?
I therefore offer the sum of $100,000 to the person who provides the full "JournoList" archive. We will protect that person's privacy and identity forever. No one will ever know who became $100,000 richer - and did the right thing, morally and ethically - by shining the light of truth on this seamy underworld of the media.
$100,000 is not a lot to spend on the Holy Grail of media bias when there is a country to save.
For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList. ...Ezra Klein, the founder of JournoList, closed it down last week after someone leaked postings by Dave Weigel bashing conservatives and calling, among other things, for Matt Drudge to set himself on fire. But Weigel was probably one of the more conservative members of the all-liberal group.
But some of the journalists who participate in the online discussion say - off the record, of course - that it has been a great help in their work. On the record, The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin acknowledged that a Talk of the Town piece - he won't say which one - got its start in part via a conversation on JournoList. And JLister Eric Alterman, The Nation writer and CUNY professor, said he's seen discussions that start on the list seep into the world beyond.
"I'm very lazy about writing when I'm not getting paid," Alterman said. "So if I take the trouble to write something in any detail on the list, I tend to cannibalize it. It doesn't surprise me when I see things on the list on people's blogs."
Last April, criticism of ABC's handling of a Democratic presidential debate took shape on JList before morphing into an open letter to the network, signed by more than 40 journalists and academics - many of whom are JList members.
But beyond these specific examples, it's hard to trace JList's influence in the media, because so few JListers are willing to talk on the record about it.
I hope someone takes Breitbart up on his offer. Finding out what media members really think and how they coordinate to create narratives favoring their biases would offer stunning proof of what believers in limited government already know.
Think government is too big?
Well, it probably is.
Why don't we raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour?
Because of a 2006 constitutional amendment, Nevada's minimum-wage will increase by 70 cents an hour on July 1.
Nevada's hourly minimum wage is set to jump 70 cents, or 9.3 percent, on Thursday, from $7.55 to $8.25 for workers who don't receive health benefits through their employer. For workers with company-sponsored health insurance, the minimum will rise 10.7 percent, from $6.55 to $7.25.Liberals, as you might imagine, are thrilled with this news.
Credit the increases to a referendum Nevada's voters passed in 2006. The law pushed the Silver State's minimum wage for uninsured workers $1 per hour higher than the federal rate, and required Nevada's base wage to rise every July 1 based on either inflation or any federal wage hike -- whichever is higher. The federal minimum rose last summer to $7.25.
But Jan Gilbert, Northern Nevada coordinator for advocacy group Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, said there's abundant national research showing that raising the minimum wage doesn't cost jobs, and such pay increases actually stimulate the broader economy. A 2009 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that boosting the federal minimum wage to $7.25 would generate $5.5 billion in additional consumer spending over a year.There's abundant national research all right, but even liberal researches (who support increasing it) admit that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. And teenagers are increasingly feeling the effects of this misguided policy.
"I think there's kind of a Chicken Little, 'sky-is-falling' reaction," Gilbert said. "If anything, what an increase really does is increase consumers' buying power, reduce costly employee turnover, raise productivity, increase consumer satisfaction and improve the reputation of companies. A raise is a benefit to our economy. It's more money being spent in our economy."
But let's leave that aside and take Gilbert at her word. If raising the minimum wage leads to this host of positive consequences, why don't we increase it to $100 an hour? or $5000? or $1 million?
This isn't a hypothetical question. I'm serious.
The answer to this question reveals the fundamental flaw in liberals' economic way of thinking. Liberals assume that there's a seemingly endless supply of other people's money (OPM) or stuff (health care, food, transportation, etc...). (Important caveat here: The only point of money is to be able to purchase things. No one wants pieces of green paper; we want the purchasing power that green paper represents.) If there is a never-ending supply of OPM and there are poor people, it logically follows that rich people are harming the poor, because they have more than their "fair share" of money. Hence it is the government's job to redistribute wealth through things like the minimum wage and taxes that punish the wealthy.
The logic is sound, except that they are basing their arguments on a faulty premise.
There isn't an endless supply of other people's money or stuff. The world, in fact, is defined by scarcity - unlimited human needs and wants in a world with limited resources and time. And if the world is defined by scarcity, we can't mandate people get paid $100 or $5000 an hour without hyperinflation or record-high unemployment that leads to complete economic collapse.
If there are scarce resources in the world - and there are - you can't mandate that someone gets something, like a wage, that they can't earn, because the resources don't exist. (Another important caveat: You can do this in the short term if you cannibalize savings that have been built up over the years or go into debt. But as the U.S. is seeing right now, that's not sustainable.) And no amount of government mandates can change this reality.
The minimum wage is just another well-intentioned policy that hurts the people its advocates claim to want to help the most.
Bonus: The Review-Journal drops a great editorial on the minimum wage today.
Supreme Court extends gun rights nationwide
5-4.
The Supreme Court held Monday that Americans have the right to own a gun for self-defense anywhere they live, expanding the conservative court's embrace of gun rights since John Roberts became Chief Justice.Full decision is here.
By a 5-4 vote, the justices cast doubt on handgun bans in the Chicago area, but signaled that some limitations on the Constitution's "right to keep and bear arms" could survive legal challenges.
Head over to HotAir for a quick breakdown of the arguments.
My favorite part is Justice Samuel Alito destroying Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent.
The next constraint JUSTICE STEVENS suggests is harder to evaluate. He describes as "an important tool for guiding judicial discretion" "sensitivity to the interaction between the intrinsic aspects of liberty and the practical realities of contemporary society." Post, at 24. I cannot say whether that sensitivity will really guide judges because I have no idea what it is. Is it some sixth sense instilled in judges when they ascend to the bench? Or does it mean judges are more constrained when they agonize about the cosmic conflict between liberty and its potentially harmful consequences? Attempting to give the concept more precision, JUSTICE STEVENS explains that "sensitivity is an aspect of a deeper principle: the need to approach our work with humility and caution." Ibid. Both traits are undeniably admirable, though what relation they bear to sensitivity is a mystery. But it makes no difference, for the first case JUSTICE STEVENS cites in support, see ibid., Casey, 505 U. S., at 849, dispels any illusion that he has a meaningful form of judicial modesty in mind.
JUSTICE STEVENS offers no examples to illustrate the next constraint: stare decisis, post, at 25. But his view of it is surely not very confining, since he holds out as a "canonical" exemplar of the proper approach, see post, at 16, 54, Lawrence, which overruled a case decided a mere 17 years earlier, Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U. S. 186 (1986), see 539 U. S., at 578 (it "was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today"). Moreover, JUSTICE STEVENS would apply that constraint unevenly: He apparently approves those Warren Court cases that adopted jot-for-jot incorporation of procedural protections for criminal defendants, post, at 11, but would abandon those Warren Court rulings that undercut his approach to substantive rights, on the basis that we have "cut back" on cases from that era before, post, at 12.
Framing the debate
Here's a great summary from Dan Mitchell at Cato. I particularly like the last line of this passage:
Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American "stimulus" and European "austerity" at the G-20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, "austerity" presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama's definition of "stimulus," by contrast, is borrowing money from China and distributing it to various Democratic-leaning special-interest groups.
Read the full post here.
Wrestling with big government
Former CEO of World Wrestilng Entertainment (WWE, formerly WWF) Linda McMahon is running for U.S. Senate in Connecticut. Obviously her opponent will poke fun of the fact she used to work with guys like The Rock and Randy Savage, but she decided to poke fun of it first. So can Mrs. McMahon wrestle big government and bring down our debt?
Five years after Kelo, property rights generally stronger
Five years ago last Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Kelo v. City of New London that the government could use eminent domain to take your home or business and give it to another private citizen or business - if the recipient promised to provide greater tax returns. Yes, the decision really is as bad as it sounds.
Fortunately, Americans haven't taken this affront to property rights lying down.
As Bob Irwin writes, the backlash in the past five years has been remarkable.
- 9 state high courts have limited eminent domain powers
- 43 state legislatures have passed greater property rights protections
- 44 eminent domain abuse projects have been defeated by grassroots activists
- 88 percent of the public now believe that property rights are as important as free speech and freedom of religion
