Love Sen. Cotton - Democrats More Dangerous Than Boll-Weevil. My Kind Of Women Seeking to Replace a Snow "Flake." Shut It Down.

This from a very old and dear friend, fellow memo reader, check signer and certainly  Not PC Sensitive . "Conservatives sign their checks on the front, Liberals sign theirs on the back !!"
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My kind of woman.  Makes you want to move to Arizona. So poetic that she is seeking to replace a snow "flake."(See 1 below.)

And

"Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on questions of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation.    

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future.  Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration."  

    — Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, 1890-1969, American soldier, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and the 34th President of the United States.  The quote is from his farewell address to the nation, January 17, 1961, 57 years ago today.

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The more I see and hear Cotton the more I like him but then I am from the south.

Democrats more dangerous than the boll-weevil (See 2 below.)
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Tillerson telling Trump keep funding Palestinians and disregard Haley.

More of this and Bolton is in at State.(See 3 below.)
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Psychiatric evaluation by Yale Dr who probably thinks one of his Yale cohorts is nuts.. (See 4 below.)

Maybe CNN will actually get their wish after all (God forbid) as their Dr Gupta asserts Trump has serious heart disease. (See 4a.)
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Nuclear talk. (See 5 below.)
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Unions favored over education?  No surprise. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) Looks like a Republican who shares President Trump's views on PC. See the final sentence. Makes you smile!

Martha McSally is a Republican Representative ( Rep. in Arizona.)  She is in the primary (running against Sheriff Arpaio) seeking the nomination for Sen. Jeff Flake’s seat. This is an excerpt from a Patriot Post article from her.  It is refreshing.  

“Rep. Martha McSally has thrown her hat in the ring. She’s a former Air Force combat pilot who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, CNS News reports, ’McSally served 26 years in uniform, retired a U.S. Air Force colonel in 2010, and is the first female pilot in U.S. history to fly in combat and the first to command a fighter squadron in combat.’  While in the Air Force, she led the fight against military policy requiring women to wear long, black robes over their uniforms. ‘I absolutely refused to bow down to Sharia law,’ she said. ‘After eight years of fighting, I won my battle to fight for the religious freedom of servicewomen.’

“In her announcement video, she let her true colors show. ‘Like our president,’ she said, ‘I’m tired of PC politicians and their BS excuses. I’m a fighter pilot and I talk like one.’  In fact, she added, ‘I told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries and get the job done.’”++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

2) Shut. It. Down.
By Erick Erickson

The GOP should keep DACA recipients in the country without citizenship and let the Democrats shut down the government.

Want to know the President's thinking on an immigration deal? The White House emailed out a link to this story yesterday evening. It's about an illegal alien with drug issues who shot and killed two police officers. The White House is going to take a very hard line on border security. Meanwhile, Senator Tom Cotton reportedly thinks Democrats would be blamed for a government shutdown and it might help the GOP in 2018.

I think Tom Cotton is right.

Democrats seem to continually overplay their hand on immigration. If Republicans offer a plan to keep DACA recipients in the country and the Democrats still shut down the government, it could re-energize a Republican base that is starting to get tired. It could also push some fence sitters away from the Democrats.

This is a fight worth having. The GOP is probably not going to offer a harsh deal on DACA because there is a strong consensus, led by the President, DACA recipients should be allowed to stay in exchange for border security. If that's the deal and the Democrats balk at it, shut down the government they would be making the case that Democrats are putting illegal aliens and lax borders ahead of the national interest.

Personally, I tend to always favor a government shutdown. People need to remember they can survive without the federal government.
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3)The Speech in Which Abbas Dug his Own Grave

By Dr. Mordechai Kedar 

Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of  the Palestine Liberation Organization, has delivered a speech triggered by his rage at the  President of the United States  Donald Trump, going so far as to  hurl the most bitter curse in the Arabic language at the POTUS:  “May your house be destroyed.”

This imprecation does not merely relate to someone’s present home, but to all the members of his family being thrown into the street to lead lives of destitution, humiliation, and shame. Only someone familiar with Middle Eastern culture understands the real significance of this curse.

The question that naturally rises is what happened that brought Abbas to the point where he is willing to burn his bridges with the US President and deliver a speech whose import is the severing of relations with the country which serves as chief funder of UNRWA, also pushing the US president towards a negative stand on the “Palestinian Issue.”

“Jerusalem, Capital of Palestine,” is an idea created after the Six Day War and further developed after the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993. Arafat turned it into a mantra, while official Israel – Shmon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Alon Liel and their cohorts – did nothing to stop him. They told us that the expression is meant for a Palestinian Arab audience, i.e. for “internal use” only. “Millions of shahids are on the march to Jerusalem!!” Arafat shouted day and night, but they told us to ignore it, that these were empty words, merely a pipe dream.

The world, led by Europe, went along with this Palestinian house of cards, financing it with billions of dollars over the years in the hopes of turning it into a real concrete structure, simply ignoring reality. Europe supported the establishment of a “Palestinian peace-loving state alongside Israel” while forgetting the fact that the PLO ideology calls for destroying the  Jewish State and that its logo includes the map of that “Palestine” reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

The world perpetuated the “Palestinian refugee problem” despite the fact that not one refugee remains of all the others who existed in the 1940s. Even Germany, which absorbed and rehabilitated the Sudetenland residents expelled from Czechoslovakia, did not demand that the Arab world do the same and absorb the “Palestinian refugees,” whose problem was created as a result of the Arab armies’ invasion of Israel one day after the Jewish State declared its independence. Europe saw Germany as the party responsible for the Sudeten refugee problem and its solution but did not do the same for the Arab states and the Palestinian refugees. That double standard is what perpetuated the Palestinian Arab refugee problem, turning it into a central bargaining chip in negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, reaching the point where Ehud Barak agreed (in the Taba talks of 2001) to a “symbolic return”  of tens of thousands of those refugees – and he was not the only one to agree with this idea.

The world did not recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and allowed Jerusalem to turn into another major bargaining chip in the “Peace talks” whose only purpose – at least according to the Arab side – was to weaken and shrink the State of Israel and bring it to a state of collapse that would make the Jews lose hope and leave the region for the countries they had lived in before they came to rebuild their ancient homeland.

Trump and the House of Cards

Enter Donald Trump, a businessman who deals with construction – not houses built of cards, but the kind meant to last for generations.  He understood that the Palestinian structure is made of cards, left standing only because of the world’s going along with European leadership, American liberal circles, the Arab states and a few Israelis suffering from burn-out. Trump understood that the Palestinian ideological structure is full of holes and decided to pull two foundational cards out of the ephemeral structure: the Jerusalem card and the refugee card.

From the minute Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital the Palestinians – both Hamas and the PLO – began engaging in frenzied activities, disturbances on the ground and political maneuvering in international corridors. They understood that Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is an insurance policy of sorts for the Jewish state.  To the Jews, Jerusalem is real, backed up by history and the Jewish religion, while it is nothing but “fake news” for the  Arab and Muslim world.

Jerusalem, however, is still not the capital of a non-established “Palestine” and remains a theoretical bone of contention, so that it could be pulled out of the Palestinian house of cards without Abbas burning his bridges with the United States.

And then Trump pulled the refugee card from the house of cards by announcing that he would cease to fund, support and perpetuate it. That act is a thousand times worse than recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital because the refugee issue has been capitalized on for seventy years, with billions of dollars poured into it, all going to waste. UNRWA operates a massive system of wage-earners, schools and aid services running on American money, whose cessation is sure to limit the organizations’ ability to breathe life into the “refugee problem”. Without adequate funding, the “refugees” are liable to spread out and be absorbed in the areas to which they move on, within the Arab world and outside it. The “refugee problem”  and its threat to Israel might even disappear.

Abbas cannot let that happen for several reasons: First, he himself is a refugee born in Safed in 1935 and his own legitimacy as a Palestinian leader is based on that fact. Second, the refugees have become addicted to living on foreign aid and taking it away will force them to work like everyone else. Third, every refugee whose funding has ceased will decide to solve this problem independently: Some will emigrate to other countries, others will be absorbed in their current locations, and the refugee problem will disappear after all those decades spent keeping it alive with massive amounts of European and American money.

Abbas understands that his house of cards, lacking Jerusalem and refugees, is about to collapse and disappear and with it all the plans to destroy Israel. The feeling that he has lost his compass is what made him lose his temper and abandon the  discretion that has always characterized his behavior, leading him to return to the depths of Arabic culture with an imprecation aimed at Trump –”May your house be destroyed.”

He used the worst of Arab curses, expressing the wish that Trump’s home is destroyed, his family thrown out into the street and that he and they live in poverty and shame, turning into homeless objects of pity to passersby. There is no more fitting expression for Abbas’ despair and disappointment as he witnesses the collapse of the Palestinian Arab house of cards once Trump removed its Jerusalem and refugee foundations.

The speech Abbas delivered to the PLO  members was a powerful reflection of his feelings. He sees the Palestinian project as facing an existential threat, with a strong and steadfast Israel, flourishing and successful, democratic and economically sound facing a culturally, ideologically, personally and politically divided Palestinian side in which the PLO-Hamas enmity stymies any hope of political progress. He belongs to a society broken into tribes, extended families and groups which never really adopted the idea of a Palestinian national ethos and never abandoned traditional family loyalties. That ideological house of cards cannot survive without the Jerusalem and refugee cards.

Abbas also does not have the Arab world standing behind him. Quite the contrary, the  Iranian issue has pushed many Arab states closer to Israel and since the Arab nations are mired in a plethora of their own internal problems, the Palestinian problem is now seen by them as nothing more than a nuisance. Abbas’ speech this week, one in which he dug his own grave, symbolized the collapse, death, and burial of the “Palestinian issue” and this is the time to find an out-of-the-box solution for it – on the lines of the “Emriate Solution,”  the only socio-political model that works successfully in the Middle East.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior lecturer in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University. He served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups and the Syrian domestic arena.

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4) Does It Take a Shrink to Evaluate Trump?

The traits that alarm some are baseline features, not signs of a disease process.

By  Sally Satel

One of my fellow Yale psychiatrists thinks President Trump ought to have his head examined—by force if necessary. Bandy X. Lee is calling for an “emergency evaluation” of Mr. Trump’s mental state. “In an emergency, neither consent nor confidentiality requirements hold,” she told Vox. “Safety comes first. What we do in the case of danger is we contain the person, we remove them from access to weapons.”

Is she serious? Democratic members of Congress seem to think so. In early December, she spent two days on Capitol Hill privately briefing a dozen of them about Mr. Trump’s purported dangerousness. “He’s going to unravel,” she told Politico, in summing up her message to lawmakers. “Trump is going to get worse and will become uncontainable with the pressures of the presidency.” Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Jamie Raskin of Maryland plan to host her at future events.

I wish Dr. Lee would stop making House calls. Her actions risk discrediting our profession.

Dr. Lee is editor of a book, published in October, titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump : 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” It grew out of an April conference on the “duty to warn.” That legal term of art originated with a 1976 California Supreme Court ruling, which found that mental-health professionals are obliged to breach confidentiality when a patient poses an impending danger of bodily harm to others.

Since neither Dr. Lee nor any of her contributors have treated Mr. Trump, the duty to warn does not apply here, except in some metaphorical sense. In calling Mr. Trump dangerous, Dr. Lee is expressing a view that millions of Americans share—and millions reject—and claiming that her expertise as a psychiatrist lends it added authority. Does it?

Under the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater rule,” it is unethical for a psychiatrist to comment on a public figure’s mental health without examining him and obtaining permission for the disclosure. But that doesn’t stop us from forming opinions. Psychiatrists, like all members of the public, can learn a great deal about the president’s behavioral patterns and temperament from news coverage and interviews, tweets, biographies and testimonials of those who know him.

Many of my colleagues say privately they believe Mr. Trump probably has a narcissistic personality disorder. If so, he likely wouldn’t be the first. A 2013 study in Psychological Science ranked the 42 past presidents on measures of “grandiose narcissism” and found that Lyndon B. Johnson scored highest, followed closely by Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Jackson.

Mental health and the capacity to serve as president—or to do any job—are different. Historians believe Abraham Lincoln suffered from clinical depression, and they also rank him one of the greatest presidents. Nor is psychological health a guarantee of fitness.

Importantly, Mr. Trump’s grandiosity, impulsivity and short attention span were already evident during the campaign and earlier; they are baseline features. Had his personality undergone rapid deterioration, there would be reason to suspect a disease process at work. If that process affected his ability to govern, the cabinet and Congress would likely ask psychiatrists and neurologists for a diagnosis, treatment options and prognosis in the course of invoking the 25th Amendment to deprive him of his powers temporarily. But ultimately that is a political process, not a medical one.

Psychiatrists would be alarmed if mental illness were considered an unconditional bar to public service. They should also worry when their colleagues promote stereotypes that equate mental illness with dangerousness. Most mentally ill people are not violent. Whatever one thinks of Mr. Trump, his actions and words are on display for all to see. The public doesn’t need experts to interpret them.

The actions of Dr. Lee and her colleagues politicize psychiatry, and in doing so squander the profession’s authority and goodwill.

Dr. Satel is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale.

4a) CNN doctor Sanjay Gupta claims Trump has heart disease

CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta disputed President Trump’s clean bill of health this week, claiming that the numbers actually suggest the president has heart disease.

“The president has heart disease,” the neurosurgeon, who has never examined Mr. Trump, declared on “New Day” Wednesday, adding that the president needs a medical plan to prevent a major heart problem in the near future.

Dr. Gupta said the presence of calcium in Mr. Trump’s blood vessels has greatly increased since 2009, and that the coronary calcium score released by the White House on Tuesday indicated that the president had already well surpassed the threshold for having heart disease and being at risk for a heart attack.

Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy and a longtime White House physician, determined during Mr. Trump’s first medical exam in office that the 71-year-old president is in excellent physical and cognitive health. During a nearly hourlong press briefing Tuesday, Dr. Jackson said the president does not have heart disease.

“No, he does not have heart disease,” he told Dr. Gupta at the briefing, the Washington Examiner reported. “I think he had great findings across the board, but the one that stands out more than anything to me is his cardiac health. His cardiac health is excellent.”

Speaking on CNN, Dr. Gupta pushed back against Dr. Jackson’s claims.

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5)

Nuclear deterrence and nuclear conflict By LOUIS RENÉBERS Needless to say, special attention should then be directed toward comparatively assessing and subsequently obstructing all adversarial opportunities to “go nuclear.”

‘Theory is a net. Only those who cast, can catch” – Karel Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Plausibly, from the very beginning Israel has had at least one continuing “mantra” regarding its undeclared and ambiguous nuclear weapons capability. It is that nuclear ordnance can never reasonably succeed except through carefully calculated non-use. In other words, the sole discernible rationale of the “bomb in the basement” has been and must remain nuclear deterrence. By definition, of course, this core objective is always contingent upon the expected rationality of pertinent adversaries. Without rational adversaries, there can be no successful nuclear deterrence. But, going forward, precisely how valid is this altogether critical assumption? For the moment, Israel’s identifiable enemies may still be considered rational, and must also be nation-states. This is the case even though sometimes Israel’s adversaries might operate in formal or informal alliance with other states, and/ or as “hybridized” actors working cooperatively with recognizable terrorist groups. At some point, moreover, Israel’s nuclear enemies could be expanded to include certain sub-state adversaries acting by themselves; most likely Iran-sponsored Hezbollah. Very soon, prima facie, Israel’s strategists must prepare to cope with increasingly substantial and complex nuclear scenarios. For the country’s nuclear deterrence posture to work long-term, particular would-be aggressor states will need to be told more rather than less about Israel’s nuclear targeting doctrine, primarily about 1) its “counter value” (counter-city) versus “counterforce” (nuclear war fighting) choices, and 2) its expected actions regarding the vulnerability and penetration capability of Israel’s nuclear forces. In essence, this means that to best prepare for all conceivable nuclear attack scenarios, Israel must plan, inter alia, for the measured replacement of “deliberate ambiguity” with various appropriate levels of “disclosure.” For Israel, one point is indisputable. The only true and continuous purpose of nuclear weapons must be nuclear deterrence. Still, there remain certain residual circumstances under which Israeli nuclear deterrence could fail. Here, in these particular circumstances, there could ensue unprecedented belligerent firings of catastrophic weapons. How might such intolerable failures actually arise? Four principal though not mutually exclusive scenarios should come quickly to the strategist’s mind. Israel’s strategic planners must analyze these nuanced and theory-based narratives closely. Correspondingly, they must prepare to deal effectively with all of them. As quickly as possible, also, these strategists must fashion similarly guiding narratives involving certain significant non-state adversaries, both Sunni and Shi’ite. In this connection, it may sometimes be necessary for Israel to “choose sides” among its relevant adversaries, thus effectively lining up with one foe against another. Needless to say, special attention should then be directed toward comparatively assessing and subsequently obstructing all adversarial opportunities to “go nuclear.” Examined together with the four basic scenarios outlined below, these narratives could help provide Israel with the needed theoretical armaments to best prevent a nuclear attack and/or nuclear war. “Theory is a net” – without it, Israeli strategic analysis must be more-or-less disjointed and unfocused. 1) NUCLEAR RETALIATION  Should an enemy state or alliance of enemy states ever launch a nuclear first strike against Israel, Jerusalem would respond, assuredly, and to whatever extent possible, with a nuclear retaliatory strike. If enemy first strikes were to involve other unconventional weapons, such as chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Israel might then still launch a nuclear reprisal. This grave decision would depend, in large measure, upon Jerusalem’s informed expectations of any follow-on enemy aggression, and also on its associated calculations of comparative damage limitation. If Israel were to absorb a massive conventional attack, a nuclear retaliation could not automatically be ruled out, especially if: a) the state aggressors were perceived to hold nuclear and/or other unconventional weapons in reserve; and/or b) Israel’s leaders were to believe that non-nuclear retaliations could not prevent annihilation of the Jewish state. A nuclear retaliation by Israel could be ruled out only in those discernible circumstances where enemy state aggressions were clearly conventional, “typical” (that is, consistent with all previous instances of attack, in both degree and intent) and hard-target oriented (that is, directed toward Israeli weapons and related military infrastructures, rather than at its civilian populations). 2) NUCLEAR COUNTER-RETALIATION  Should Israel ever feel compelled to preempt enemy state aggression with conventional weapons, the target state(s)’ response would largely determine Jerusalem’s next moves. If this response were in any way nuclear, Israel would doubtlessly turn to some available form of nuclear counter-retaliation. If this retaliation were to involve other, non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, Israel could also feel pressed to take the escalatory initiative. Again, this decision would depend upon Jerusalem’s judgments of enemy intent, and upon its corollary calculations of essential damage limitation. Should the enemy state response to Israel’s preemption be limited to hard-target conventional strikes, it is unlikely that the Jewish state would then move to any nuclear counter-retaliations. If, however, the enemy conventional retaliation was “all-out” and directed toward Israeli civilian populations as well as to Israeli military targets, an Israeli nuclear counter-retaliation could not immediately be excluded. Such a counter-retaliation could be ruled out only if the enemy state’s conventional retaliation were identifiably proportionate to Israel’s preemption; confined to Israeli military targets; circumscribed by the legal limits of “military necessity”; and accompanied by certain explicit and verifiable assurances of non-escalatory intent. 3) NUCLEAR PREEMPTION  It is highly implausible that Israel would ever decide to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. Although circumstances could arise wherein such a strike would be both perfectly rational, and permissible under authoritative international law, it is unlikely that Israel would ever allow itself to reach such irremediably dire circumstances. Moreover, unless the nuclear weapons involved were usable in a fashion still consistent with longstanding laws of war, this most extreme form of preemption could represent an expressly egregious violation of international law. Even if such consistency were possible, the psychological/ political impact on the entire world community would be strongly negative and far-reaching. In essence, this means that an Israeli nuclear preemption could conceivably be expected only: a) where Israel’s pertinent state enemies had acquired nuclear and/or other weapons of mass destruction judged capable of annihilating the Jewish state; b) where these enemies had made it clear that their intentions paralleled their genocidal capabilities; c) where these enemies were believed ready to begin an operational “countdown to launch”; and d) where Jerusalem believed that Israeli non-nuclear preemptions could not achieve the needed minimum levels of damage limitation – that is, levels consistent with physical preservation of the Jewish state. 4) NUCLEAR WAR FIGHTING  Should nuclear weapons ever be introduced into any actual conflict between Israel and its many enemies, either by Israel or by a regional foe, nuclear war fighting, at one level or another, could ensue. This would hold true so long as: a) enemy first strikes did not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; b) enemy retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption did not destroy the Jewish state’s nuclear counter- retaliatory capability; c) Israeli preemptive strikes involving nuclear weapons did not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capabilities; and d) Israeli retaliation for conventional first strikes did not destroy the enemy’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability. This means that to satisfy its most indispensable survival imperatives, Israel must take appropriate steps to ensure the likelihood of a) and b) above, and the simultaneous unlikelihood of c) and d). Above everything else, Israel must prepare thoughtfully for all possible nuclear war contingencies, even when any such preparations would be enormously “expensive.” For Israel, looking ahead, even its most evidently threatening nuclear weapons could prove absolutely useless or self-defeating unless there had first been suitable advance planning for every imaginable conflict scenario. It goes without saying that although such planning will seem exhausting, both intellectually and fiscally, it also represents an utterly incontestable sine qua non for the Jewish state’s national survival. The writer was educated at Princeton (PhD, 1971), and is the author of many books, monographs and articles dealing with Israeli nuclear strategy. Emeritus professor of international law at Purdue, he has lectured on this topic for more than 40 years at universities and leading academic centers for strategic studies. His twelfth book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving amid Chaos, was published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 6) A Very Bad Bargain A Cornell study says students suffer from collective bargaining. By The Editorial Board On Tuesday at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos kicked off the New Year by calling for a rethink of the federal approach to education that has failed over both Republican and Democratic administrations. Sounds good. But to her list of questions that never even get asked, we’d add: Does collective bargaining by teachers help or hurt students? Two Cornell academics— Michael Lovenheim, an associate professor of policy analysis and management, and Alexander Willén, a doctoral student—have recently completed a study that tries to answer it. In “A Bad Bargain: How teacher collective bargaining affects students’ employment and earnings later in life,” the professors conclude: “We find strong evidence that teacher collective bargaining has a negative effect on students’ earnings as adults.” Given that 34 states since 1959 have mandated collective bargaining with teachers and only seven prohibit it, the finding is also a call to reform. The study compares outcomes for students in states that mandate collective bargaining before and after the collective-bargaining requirement was imposed to outcomes for students over the same period in states that did not require collective bargaining. It also adjusted for the share of the student’s state birth cohort that is black, Hispanic, white and male. Students who spent all 12 years of their elementary and secondary education in schools with mandatory collective bargain earned $795 less per year as adults than their peers who weren’t in such schools. They also worked on average a half hour less per week, were 0.9% less likely to be employed, and were in occupations requiring lower skills. The authors found that these add up to a large overall loss of $196 billion per year for students educated in the 34 states with mandated collective bargaining. All of this bolsters the accumulating evidence that collective bargaining may be profitable for the teachers and staff of public schools, but the price is being paid by the students. One solution is reforms like Governor Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin that diminish the power of collective bargaining in education. If that’s too hard politically, the alternative are charter schools or vouchers that give parents the option of avoiding the damage to their children from collective bargaining. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++