Nothing seems to be inspiring me to write much this evening, so I’m just going to post a few links that I found interesting.

I’m generally an Anti-Federalist; I’d much rather we have strong state governments than a strong central, Federal government. Dafydd ab Hugh wrote about an assault on federalism (in the sense that the Federal government was taking over, which would make it the only government) a week or so ago. Megan McArdle touched on the same topic when she was writing about The Moral Hazard of a State Bailout. Both posts are worth reading.

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education revealed that 73% of would-be teachers failed the mathematics portion of their licensing exam. This wasn’t college level math here — it was elementary level:

The teacher’s licensing exam tested potential teachers on their knowledge of elementary school mathematics. This included geometry, statistics, and probability.

Why would anyone not want the government to run healthcare? They’ve done so well with education. Give it a few years, and government healthcare will involve massively underpaid doctors with a two-to-one (or higher) ratio of (equally over-paid) administrators to doctors. That’s a surefire model for success, as we see here.

I’m pretty up-front about the fact that I used to do an absolutely horrible job with money. I didn’t need a “budget”, I knew, because I was pretty smart and would be able to manage without one. I consistently had overdrafts, I’d put off bills because I couldn’t cover them… My financial life was, in short, an utter ruin. I’m doing much better now, but only because I started formally planning and tracking my spending.

So, it filled me with a great deal of dread when I realized that the Obama budget was created just by spending what they felt like spending, not by implementing any sort of budgeting process.

Yep, this new administration fills me with confidence…