It’s Friday!

Upcoming events:
-Today is the deadline to register for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s first Policy Briefing Luncheon of 2010, “A Toolkit for the Budget-Conscious Government,” at noon on Tuesday, January 26, at Atlanta’s Commerce Club. The keynote speaker is Reason Foundation’s director of Government Reform, Leonard Gilroy, who will discuss practical approaches to effective and efficient government around the nation.
- The first 2010 event of the Foundation’s Georgia Climate Change Education Project is  “The Changing Climate of Climate Change,” a noon Policy Briefing Luncheon with Paul Chesser, director of the Heartland Institute’s Climate Strategies Watch, on Thursday, February 11, at the Commerce Club. The registration deadline is Tuesday, February 9.
Click on the links for more information about the events. The registration fee for Policy Briefing Luncheons is $35 for members; $45 for non-members. Register online at www.gppf.org or by calling 404-256-4050.

Quotable:
"To the security of a free constitution [knowledge] contributes in various ways – by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness – cherishing the first, avoiding the last – and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.” – George Washington, First State of the Union Address, January 8, 1790
- “When we consider that this Government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these States; that the States themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote.” – Thomas Jefferson, First State of the Union Address, December 8, 1801  

Notable:
- The U.S. economy dropped 85,000 jobs in December, bringing the jobs lost total to 2.7 million since the $787 billion stimulus was passed. Since the first reporting deadline in October, 94,341 fake jobs reported as jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus have been uncovered. As the Heritage Foundation points out, the problem with any stimulus plan is that “every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy.  No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Businesses are telling pollsters that among the biggest reasons they are not creating jobs is the prospect of new tax and regulatory burdens.”  Source: Heritage Foundation

Education:
- Lessons in school choice: In Sweden, all students have the option to switch to another public school or to attend a private school. The money follows the student, in a voucher representing 85 percent of the cost of local public schools; private schools may not charge additional tuition. According to the Stockholm County governor and former education minister Per Unckel, “[T]he results have shown rising standards across the board. The program has also helped desegregate schools in cities with large immigrant populations, such as Stockholm. Today, more than 15 years after the implementation of this universal voucher program, more than 80 percent of Swedish children still attend public schools.” Source: The Swedish Wire
- The Head Start school-readiness program is education's bridge to nowhere, according to a Department of Health and Human Services analysis. As Jay Greene, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, writes for the Goldwater Institute, “The long and short of it is that the government runs an enormously expensive pre-school program that has made basically no difference for the students who participate in it. And folks are proposing that we expand government pre-school to include all students.”  

- Visit www.gppf.org to read the Foundation’s latest commentary, “Relax (Regulation) and Map a Road to Economic Recovery,” by Mike Klein. 

Have a great weekend. 

Kelly McCutchen