Weekly Writers Round-Up: Wasteful College Spending, Backfiring Foreign Policy, and Harmful Vaping Taxes

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Applications for the summer session are now open!

Taxpayers Fund College Degrees That Don’t Pay Off by Preston Cooper (Fall 2015) in Forbes
Late last year, the Education Department publicly released the typical student debt and starting salary for graduates of thousands of higher education programs nationwide. A new interactive tool from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) puts this data to innovative use, showing where the typical student’s debt burden is high relative to her earnings. It’s a useful tool for students, but it also exposes the hypocrisy and limitations of past federal government approaches to accountability for the colleges and universities that soak up billions in taxpayer dollars every year.

TPPF’s analysis mirrors that of an Obama-era regulation, the Gainful Employment rule. This regulation aimed to penalize colleges and programs where earnings after graduation were too low to justify the typical student’s debt burden. Though the Trump administration repealed the regulation before its penalties could take effect, colleges nonetheless shuttered many educational programs which “failed” the rule…

Former U.S. Marine: Suleimani’s Killing Is the Apotheosis of American ‘Strategy’ by Gil Barndollar (Summer 2018) in the National Interest
For all the righteous uproar it produced and the consequences still unfolding, in a way the killing of Iranian Major General Qassim Suleimani this month was business as usual. A longtime foe of America, Suleimani was killed by a Hellfire missile from a Reaper drone, like countless Al Qaeda terrorists, Taliban leaders, and other militants. Traveling to Iraq from Syria, Suleimani probably didn’t even require the full exertions of America’s vast intelligence and special operations manhunting machine. His death by drone was far more mundane than the Hollywood raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Only the Iranian response—a casualty-free retaliatory missile strike—was new…

Vaping Tax Economics by Jacob James Rich (Fall 2018) in RealClearHealth
A new study of the e-cigarette tax in Minnesota has verified the first rule of economics: the more something costs, the less people buy. The study’s authors, mostly National Bureau of Economic Research economists, found Minnesota’s tax levied on e-cigarettes “increased adult smoking and reduced smoking cessation in Minnesota.” Although the findings agree with previous studies, showing that higher taxes successfully reduce vaping, they also find that e-cigarette taxes have re-incentivized the use of conventional cigarettes.

Despite an abundance of literature that shows excessive e-cigarette taxes are bad for public health, policymakers in states like Minnesota have increased vaping taxes so much that they make traditional cigarettes relatively less expensive—and consumers have responded. According to the NBER authors, an estimated 32,400 fewer people quit smoking cigarettes in Minnesota because of its recent 95 percent excise tax on e-cigarettes. They then postulate that if the same tax was levied across the entire United States, 1.8 million fewer people would quit smoking over a 10-year period…