Political Correctness Run Amok in Massachusetts

This may be even worse than all the examples of anti-gun political correctness that I’ve shared.

Get a load of what some anti-achievement nutjobs in Taxachusetts have decided.

John Gillis has two students at the middle school who have worked hard to make the honor roll this year, but they won’t be able to attend the school’s annual honors night to celebrate their achievement. That’s because the school administration has decided to end the long-standing tradition… “We took it from an exclusive nighttime ceremony where only honors students were invited and rolled it into our end-of-the-year assembly,” Principal David Fabrizio said. “That way, everybody can celebrate their and their peers’ achievements.”

Yes, let’s all get participation medals simply for breathing. But it gets worse.

Fabrizio said that it is the school’s job to monitor both academic and social emotional growth. Concentrating on grades, “as strange as it sounds, can impinge upon the learning process,” he wrote. “The honors night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average,” Fabrizio wrote.

Too bad this didn’t exist when I was in school. I never once made the Honor Roll when I was a young slacker. Too bad political correctness hadn’t taken hold back then. I could have been taught that it was okay to never achieve anything.

But perhaps that would have made my life easier. Instead of engaging in the Sisyphean task of trying to roll back the welfare state, I could be doing something really productive…like being an overpaid bureaucrat making life harder for those who actually are trying to create wealth for the economy.

P.S. Take a wild guess whether Principal Fabrizio supports class-warfare tax rates as a way of mitigating the “devastating” differences between those that produce and those that don’t.

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(Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Fiscal Policy Debate in a Single Chart

I’m a sucker for a good flowchart because they either can help to simplify analysis or they can show how something is very complex.

Some of my favorites include:

• This explanation of double taxation.
• This depiction of the no-win Greek economic crisis.
• Portrayals of Obamacare complexity here and here.

I’d like to see a good fiscal policy flowchart, one that captures all the options for policymakers.

I created a matrix early last year to illustrate some of the goals and tradeoffs, but it wasn’t comprehensive.

Well, the folks at the UK-based Social Market Foundation have stepped into the breach and put together a flowchart that seems to cover every option.

They call it “The Gordian Knot of Growth.” It’s designed for the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to our Treasury Secretary and Office of Management and Budget Director), but I think the various boxes also capture almost all of the various policy prescriptions in the US.

But notice that I said this flowchart presents “almost all” of the options. You’ll notice that there’s no box for “tax increases” or “higher marginal tax rates.” That will give you an idea of how Obama’s class-warfare tax policy is way out of the mainstream.

For what it’s worth, I belong in more than one category. I’m an “Expansionary fiscal contractionist,” as well as a “Deregulator” and (under the TINA options) a supporter of “Long term measures.”

In other words, the burden of government spending should be reduced and we should allow markets to allocate resources.

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