Author: Bob Weeks
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Unintended but foreseeable harms of the minimum wage
Understanding the minimum wage, and why an increase will be harmful to those it is meant to help, requires thinking beyond stage one.
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Problem of low wages not easily solved
It seems like an easy fix for social injustice: pass a law requiring employers to pay workers more than they would otherwise. Magically, everyone has more wealth. It would be nice if it were so easy and simple. Looking at only the immediate effects and listening to the rhetoric of some politicians and editorial writers,…
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Eminent Doman and the Downtown Wichita Arena
On August 25, 2004 and prior to the arena vote in November of that year, I presented testimony before this Commission questioning the wisdom of building a downtown arena without knowing the exact location of the parcel(s) of land the project would be located on. I asked the questions, does the Commission know the exact…
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School lawsuit likely to resume after election
School finance lawsuits have been a driving force behind state spending policy for almost two decades in Kansas. The July 28 Kansas Supreme Court ruling only ends the latest and most expensive school finance lawsuit. This decision only creates a brief pause until the inconvenience of the 2006 election is behind us in just over…
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Adjusting the testing gap
Charles Murray has a commentary titled “Acid Tests” which describes how the way that the No Child Left Behind program uses test scores is misleading. By adjusting what states use to measure “proficiency,” states can appear to be closing the gap between different groups of students. In Texas, the gap between the percentage of white…
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Kansas Taxpayers Network 2006 legislative vote ratings released
“There are 17 Kansas legislators who scored 100% on the Kansas Taxpayers Network’s 2006 fiscal scorecard,” said KTN Executive Director Karl Peterjohn. Legislators were measured on their votes on tax and fiscal issues as well as their votes on reining in judicial activists and judicial appropriations. This scorecard also measured on their votes on correcting…
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Consider carefully costs of a new Wichita airport terminal
As Wichita considers building a new terminal at its airport, we should pause to consider the effect an expensive new terminal would have on the cost of traveling to and from Wichita, and by extension, the economic health and vitality of our town.
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Remarks to Wichita City Council Regarding the AirTran Subsidy on July 11, 2006
You may recall that I have spoken to this body in years past expressing my opposition to the AirTran subsidy. At that time we were told that the subsidy was intended to be a short-tem measure. Today, four years after the start of the subsidy, with state funding planned for the next five years, it…
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Even the New York Times recognizes testing fraud
A New York Times editorial titled “The School Testing Dodge” realizes that nearly all states report student achievement scores, as measured by their own tests, that are much higher than what the same students do on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress exam.