Video of Rep. Bob Etheridge (D‑N.C.) assaulting a student who asked him if he supports the Obama agenda. (HT Radley Balko)

Gov. McDonnell just signed a bill that will give a tax credit to the film industry. They will shell out up to $2.5 million to movie-makers in the first year and up to $5 million thereafter. Proponents say it might save money. Unfortunately, the evidence from other states suggests it will lose money.

At a time of economic turmoil and budget problems, the Governor wants to lose money by giving a tax credit to the film industry. It’s even refundable, which in normal-talk means the state will send a check to a film executive even if he doesn’t owe any taxes; that’s a straight BAILOUT, not a tax credit. The last thing Virginia needs is another corporate bailout.

What is wrong with our Commonwealth? And what in the world is Governor McDonnell thinking?

There is one tax credit that has consistently proven to save money and increase achievement in public schools: education tax credits.

Florida recently expanded its successful education tax credit program to $140 million with the support of 42 percent of Democrats and almost every Republican. The program was found by the government to save $1.49 for every dollar invested in the credits. And the official academic researcher for the program just found that it significantly increases public school performance.

Strangely, education tax credits are not on the Governor’s agenda. Why?

Why is a Governor who had the good sense to appoint a true education reformer, Gerard Robinson, as the Secretary of Education not out front leading the movement for effective, efficient investment in education?

Look to Pennsylvania, to Georgia, Iowa, Rhode Island, Illinois, Arizona, any of the nine states supporting twelve education tax credit programs to see the new, bipartisan wave of education reform. A toothless Virginia charter school law will do nothing to improve education or save money. And the constitution won’t allow a strong charter law.

We need to save money, not waste it on another corporate bailout. We need to increase achievement.

We need leadership, Governor. We need education tax credits in Virginia. Now.

When it comes to paid maternity leave, the United States is in the postpartum dark ages.

One hundred and seventy-seven nations — including Djibouti, Haiti and Afghanistan — have laws on the books requiring that all women, and in some cases men, receive both income and job-protected time off after the birth of a child.

From the Washington Post:

Nearly 400 people were convicted of driving while intoxicated in the District since fall 2008 based on inaccurate results from breath test machines, and half of them went to jail, city officials said Wednesday.

D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said the machines were improperly adjusted by city police. The jailed defendants generally served at least five days, he said…

The District’s badly calibrated equipment would show a driver’s blood-alcohol content to be about 20 percent higher than it actually was, Nickles said. All 10 of the breath test machines used by District police were wrong, he said. The problem occurred when the officer in charge of maintaining the machines improperly set the baseline alcohol concentration levels, Nickles said.

This is the same jurisdiction where a woman who had a single glass of wine with dinner and a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) of .03 was arrested for being under the influence in 2005. The national standard for a DWI arrest is .08, and anyone testing below .05 is presumed not to be intoxicated. The District of Columbia’s standard for arrest was anything above .01 if the officer deemed the driver intoxicated. Public outcry over the strict policy, particularly in a town built on tourism, prompted the D.C. Council to temporarily amend the law. The D.C. Police website still says that police can charge DUI (Driving Under the Influence, not Driving While Intoxicated) for a BAC of .07 or lower.

There is good reason to question the foundation of DWI laws and enforcement. Radley Balko makes the case that the federal push for reducing the national DWI BAC standard from .10 to .08 achieved little for public safety in Back Door to Prohibition: The New War on Social Drinking. Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) founder Candy Lightner regrets the no-tolerance direction her organization has taken: “[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned… I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving.”

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Downsizing’s new Department of Transportation website is up and running!
• A new essay on “Overpaid Federal Workers” is also up and it’s already generating a lot of buzz in the media.
• Amtrak’s reputation for financial shenanigans lives on.
• Kudos to the Washington Post for pointing out what we’ve been saying for a while: “regime uncertainty” is stifling the economy’s ability to recover.
• President Obama’s lieutenants have instructed federal agencies to come up with spending cuts equal to five percent of their discretionary budgets for fiscal year 2012. 2012? Why wait?!?!

The drums of a trade war with China are beating more loudly in Congress this week. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D‑N.Y., is threatening to introduce a bill in the next two weeks that would raise tariffs on imports from China if it does not quickly appreciate the value of its currency, the yuan.

The argument behind the bill is that an artificially cheap yuan makes Chinese goods too attractive for struggling American consumers, to the disadvantage of certain U.S. companies that would prefer to charge us higher prices, while it stifles U.S. exports to China.

The latest monthly trade report, released yesterday by the U.S. Department of Commerce, should give pause to those who want to punish China for its currency policies.

In the first four months of 2010, compared to the same period in 2009, U.S. exports of goods and services to China were up 41 percent. That is twice the rate of growth of our exports to the rest of the world excluding China.

Meanwhile, imports from China were up 14 percent year-to-date, compared to a 25 percent increase in imports from the rest of the world. As a result, while our trade deficit with all other countries grew by 46 percent, from $78 billion to $114 billion, our trade deficit with China grew only 6 percent, from $67 billion to $71 billion.

A more flexible, market-driven yuan would be welcome, for all the reasons we’ve written about at the Center for Trade Policy Studies, but its current rate is not an excuse for raising trade barriers.

Congress has been trying to overturn the Citizens United decision for the past four months. (Citizens United invalidated bans on speech by groups taking a corporate form). Their effort — the DISCLOSE Act — now seems bogged down in the House of Representatives. The National Rifle Association argues that they should not have to disclose their small donors. The labor unions also have complaints:

Amaya Tune, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO, told Bloomberg this week that “the final bill should treat corporations different than democratic organizations such as unions. We believe the legislation should counter the excessive and disproportionate influence by big business and guarantee effective disclosure of who is paying for what.”

Here’s the problem: The Supreme Court has ruled that Congress cannot regulate campaign finance to achieve equality of influence. Ms. Tune is calling for changes in DISCLOSE to “counter the excessive and disproportionate influence by big business.” If Congress enacts those changes, how can the law be defended against the charge that Congress is seeking to legislate a greater equality of influence? Won’t the parts of the law demanded by the unions be unconstitutional?