The Public Education Tax Credit

Public education is an end, not a means. For a democratic nation to thrive, its schools must prepare children not only for success in private life but for participation in public life. It must foster harmonious social relations among the disparate groups in our pluralistic society and ensure universal access to a quality education. Unfortunately, the American school system has long fallen short as a means of fulfilling these purposes. This paper offers a more effective way of delivering on the promise of public education, by ensuring that all families have the means to choose their children's schools from a diverse market of education providers. All education providers -- government, religious, and secular -- can contribute to public education because all can serve the public by educating children. Educational freedom can most effectively be realized through nonrefundable education tax credits -- for both parents' education costs for their own children and taxpayer donations to nonprofit scholarship funds. This paper argues that tax credits enjoy practical, legal, and political advantages over school vouchers. These advantages are even more important for choice programs that target low-income children, as tax credits mitigate some disadvantages inherent to targeted programs. It also contends that broad-based programs are superior to narrowly targeted ones, even when the goal is specifically to serve disadvantaged students. Targeted programs are fundamentally inferior -- in both practical and strategic terms -- to broad-based programs that include the voting middle class. Finally, accountability in education means accountability to parents and taxpayers. Education tax credits afford this accountability without the need for intrusive government regulations that create political and market liabilities for school choice policies. To date, school choice policy has spread and grown only slowly, in part because of inadequate legislation. Existing school choice laws fall short in terms of both market principles and political considerations. Pursuing a policy that follows more closely what works economically and politically should increase the likelihood of long-term legislative success, program success, program survival, and program expansion

The Courier Conundrum: The High Costs of Prosecuting Low-Level Drug Couriers and What We Can Do About Them

Since the United States declared its “War on Drugs,” federal enforcement of drug-trafficking crimes has led to increased incarceration and longer prison sentences. Many low-level drug couriers and drug mules have suffered disproportionately from these policies; they face mandatory punishments that vastly exceed their culpability. Drug couriers often lack substantial ties to drug-trafficking organizations, which generally recruit vulnerable individuals to act as couriers and mules. By using either threats of violence or promises of relatively small sums of money, these organizations convince recruits to overlook the substantial risks that drug couriers face. The current policies of pursuing harsh punishments for low-level couriers generate significant societal costs. These costs include not only monetary costs but also collateral damage imposed on both the couriers and innocent third parties. Further, these harsh policies fail to generate appreciable benefits or satisfy the goals of either retributive or utilitarian theories of punishment. This Note proposes a legislative amendment to the current importation statute that would create a carveout under which low-level drug couriers could be charged under a separate misdemeanor statute. The proposal lays out a number of criteria that drafters could use to identify lowlevel participants and exempt them from the stiff mandatory minimum sentences and the long-term consequences that accompany a felony drug conviction

Technological Opportunity and Spillovers of R&D: Evidence from Firms' Patents, Profits and Market Value

This paper presents evidence that firms' patents, profits and market value are systematically related to the"technological position" of firms' research programs. Further, firms are seen to "move" in technology space in response to the pattern of contemporaneous profits at different positions. These movements tend to erode excess returns."Spillovers" of R&D are modelled by examining whether the R&D of neighboring firms in technology space has an observable impact on the firm's R&D success. Firms whose neighbors do much R&D produce more patents per dollar of their own R&D,with a positive interaction that gives high R&D firms the largest benefit from spillovers. In terms of profit and market value, however, their are both positive and negative effects of nearby firms' R&D. The net effect is positive for high R&D firms, but firms with R&D about one standard deviation below the mean are made worse off overall by the R&D of others.

Zero modes of the Dirac operator in three dimensions

We investigate zero modes of the Dirac operator coupled to an Abelian gauge field in three dimensions. We find that the existence of a certain class of zero modes is related to a specific topological property precisely when the requirement of finite Chern--Simons action is imposed.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, uses the macro psbox.tex, replaced by a revised version to be published in Phys. Rev. D. The section on the Seiberg-Witten equations, which contained a sign error, has been removed. This removal leads to further issues which will appear in a future publicatio

Slow dynamics in a driven two-lane particle system

We study a two-lane model of two-species of particles that perform biased diffusion. Extensive numerical simulations show that when bias q is strong enough oppositely drifting particles form some clusters that block each other. Coarsening of such clusters is very slow and their size increases logarithmically in time. For smaller q particles collapse essentially on a single cluster whose size seems to diverge at a certain value of q=q_c. Simulations show that despite slow coarsening, the model has rather large power-law cooling-rate effects. It makes its dynamics different from glassy systems, but similar to some three-dimensional Ising-type models (gonihedric models).Comment: minor changes, final versio