The Cassidy-Graham healthcare bill would give some of the money that is spent on the PPACA to the states.
The bill seems bad on the details (to be expected from congress even PPACA was bad on details) but since the big problem with healthcare in the USA is cost, driven BTW by growing bureaucracy part of which is due to state regulation, I think would be a good idea to give all the money that the Federal Government normally spends on healthcare to the states. how much money each state got would based on age adjusted population. The states would be required to at least cover the old (Medicare), the poor (Medicaid) and Federal Government employees.
Cost looks to me like a state problem because health care spending per capta in Utah is lower than in stingy Canada and only slight higher in Arizona which has an old population. States like Utah and Arizona and maybe even Texas might be able to cover everyone with what they get from the Feds. High spending states woudl have an incentive to regulate with more attention toward costs.
Alternatively the Fed Gov. could take over all health care regulations from the states. As it is now the fed Gov subsidizes demand and the states restrict supply which is what you would expect considering he incentives.
We should lead by example and make Brownsville or Detroit charter cities. The current residents would keep their US citizenship but newcomers would need a passport and VISA to get into the rest of the USA.
A lot of capital is going to waste in Detroit. we would people to fill Detroit, but most voters don't want more immigrants and they know that you cann't keep people in the area that you want. I have heard that programs that bring in immigrant MD's to places like Iowa have a problem with them moving.
But I don't see anyone taking this up, such is nationalism. So Paul Romer should understand that it is unlikely to be accepted elsewhere. Argentina might be the best bet because they seem to have an open boarders policy now.
My null hypothesis says that spending more (inflation adjusted) on schooling than was spent in 1960 (that's about 1/3 of what is spent today) has no positive effect on measured student academic outcomes.
Also that only a tiny fraction (perhaps .1%) of schools are good or bad schools. The rest are judged good or bad because they have good or bad students. So parents should relax and only try to avoid the worst .1% of schools and not pay more for a home in a “good” school district.
My mother has told me that her parents went to school for just 1 year, yet they where educated. They were not superstitious as many where in their era. They could read and write and do arithmetic. They read books. They owned and ran a barber shop they speculated on real-estate (but lost most but not all of it in the great depression) and sent their son to Brown University. School is not only place people learn.
Perhaps 3 years of formal schooling would be enough for most people. Nevertheless in the modern world we'd need something for them to do so maybe keeping most in school to 16 is a good idea, not so much for education but to keep them out of trouble. The Amish drop out early and do OK.
For a modern example, the guy who invented this car claims to have dropped out of school at 14 years old.
Also, if we cannot teach children more and it looks like we cannot, we should focus on teaching the most valuable stuff.