Pay-to-Play Is Squeezing Kids Out of School Sports

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards wants you to know that it’s easy to reduce federal spending by ten percent, you just need to be willing to let kids go hungry: 10. Food Subsidies (Food Stamps and School Lunch). Low-income families often suffer from poor food choices and obesity, not a shortage of calories. Food aid for the needy should be left to private charities. Save $90 billion.

Most people would say that making low-income taxpayers pay a higher tax rate on each additional dollar they earn would be a funny way of “helping” the poor.  Yet that’s just the approach of a bill passed yesterday by the Iowa Senate to raise Iowa’s earned income tax credit (SF 422).  The bill would raise the Iowa earned income credit from current 7% of the federal credit to 20%.

By Dylan Matthews

If you'd like to get a roundup of many of the problems you read in this blog, topped with rage about the NCAA, I point you to Luke Cyphers' well-reported piece on SBNation.com titled "A Different World: How One Small College Is Quitting Sports -- And Might Lead A Revolution." The story starts out talking about Spellman College killing its varsity sports to concentrate on improving the physical fitness of all its students, and goes from there into pretty much every failing of the high school and college sports system, with some writing that would do Howard Beale proud: Our great nation was just