Hilary Clinton's Universal Preschool Proposal

Sara:

Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it's a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and scaling up to $10 billion) to expand publicly-funded preschool programs, with a priority on low-income and English language learners, and requires state preschool programs to meet high quality standards as a condition of funding.

Yin to that Yang: Congress passes a 10.5% increase in pentagon spending (Representative Tammy Baldwin's votes can be found here). Alan Abelson takes a look at the dollar and what it portends for the next few years:

Whatever their provenance, they've crafted a quite interesting analysis of what ails the dollar and why what ails it isn't anything trivial or transient. In fact, they see nothing but mournful things ahead for the buck, including, ultimately, its fall from grace as the world's reserve currency.

Basically, they size up the dilemma confronting our "policymakers" as whether to tighten the monetary and credit screws to bolster the dollar or to open them up even further to support asset prices. They have no doubts as to the resolution: The folks in charge will continue to do what they've always done -- "inflate the money supply and promote more credit, thereby sustaining asset prices at the expense of the purchasing power of the dollar."

That may seem the downward path to financial and eventually economic rack and ruin. But such a trivial consideration has never deterred Washington. You don't have to swallow whole QB Partners' gloomy diagnosis and prognosis for the beleaguered buck to find it valuable as well as provocative. Even though we agree there's plenty of sliding room left for the greenback, we're not convinced the outlook is as apocalyptic as the duo contends.

The report itself is nicely, almost elegantly, crafted, although at times it lapses into a kind of faux erudition, a tendency compounded somewhat by windy footnotes. Nonetheless, unlike so much of the tomes turned out by Wall Street, it's very much worth reading.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 22, 2007 12:05 AM
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