SAT Scores Are Down Again. Let’s Celebrate.

Bloomberg News's Janet Lorin reports that American high-schoolers bombed on the SAT this year, with the average critical reading score falling 1 point to 496 from a year earlier, the lowest since data became available in 1972.  The average score for writing dropped 1 point to 488, the lowest since the section was added in 2006. (Math scores held steady.) The College Board, which administers the test, also found that only 43 percent of seniors were prepared for college.

Hooray!

In today's Los Angeles Times, Mark Z. Barabak tells the tale of Culinary Local 226, a 54,000-member union that may be crucial to President Barack Obama's chances of winning Nevada. The largely Hispanic union is sufficiently peeved at Obama that it had previously threatened to sit out the election.

Dispirited or not, Local 226 is now working for the president. Why?

War, terrorism, disease, poverty, death. For most people, these concepts cause a great deal of angst. For Germans, it's inflation that's the most troubling.

Rising consumer prices emerged as the biggest worry for 63 percent of Germans in surveys cited yesterday by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. Inflation beat out serious illness (53 percent), lower living standards in old age (40 percent) and terrorism (39 percent). There aren't many living Germans who remember the hyperinflation of the 1920s during the Weimar Republic, so the fear is mostly a response to the recent acts of central bankers.

Here's some recent history to ponder as the calls for military action against Iran intensify.

Ten years ago, President George W. Bush and top officials in his administration assured Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that a U.S. invasion of Iraq was justified and wouldn't be that difficult.

Today, the Romney campaign released a summary of Mitt Romney’s tax returns since 1990 and his 2011 tax return. The most striking part of the announcement is that Romney chose to forego $1.75 million in charitable deductions available to him in 2011 in order to ensure that his tax rate would be at least 13 percent, the estimated level he announced in January.

Foregoing those deductions is an interesting choice for two reasons, and not simply because Mitt is leaving money on the table. The first is that, less than two months ago, Romney argued that overpaying your taxes is a sign of incompetence. He told ABC News:

When is a dollar not worth a dollar? In presidential politics.

According to a Bloomberg News analysis of the latest campaign finance disclosures, the Romney campaign, the Republican National Committee and allied conservative super-PACs together ended August with $165 million on hand. Their equivalents on the Democratic side had far less -- a combined $101 million.

More than a decade ago, after the burst of the original dot-com bubble, a frequent subject of complaints among investors and journalists was the proliferation of fuzzy “pro forma” financial metrics in companies’ reports to investors. Starting in about the late 1990s, many companies would routinely goose their profits by pretending lots of ordinary expenses didn’t exist, at least for the purposes of their press releases.

That’s how Enron Corp., for example, managed to show “recurring earnings” of $393 million for the third quarter of 2001 -- just as it was in the process of imploding. The figure, which didn’t fool anyone in the end, excluded more than a billion dollars of stuff that counted as expenses under U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.

There has been one silver lining to the rise of Internet spam: It is easier to get rid of than old-fashioned junk mail. Unfortunately, the U.S. Postal Service wants to step up the assault on your real-world mailbox.

Desperate to escape its financial sinkhole, the Postal Service has begun offering discounts to companies and direct-mail marketers that step up their use of unsolicited letters, which last year amounted to 84 billion credit-card offers, Coldwater Creek catalogs and so forth. Its website has a handy new section called Every Door Direct Mail to make it easier for small business to send citizens a flood of solicitations. Postmaster General Bob Donahoe belittled online alternatives to the New York Times: "You can advertise on Facebook, but I don’t see how you can trace the number of 'likes' to return on investment."

A mile-high skyscraper? That may indeed be possible as soon as 2025, Bloomberg News reported this week. You may view this as a sign of architectural evolution -- of mankind reaching for the stars and of the promise of emerging nations that are sure to compete to build the world’s tallest tower. I tend to wonder if we'll all be homeless 13 years from now.

My worry: the Skyscraper Curse. For whatever reason, there's an uncanny correlation between architectural one-upmanship and financial crises. Examples include Dubai in 2008, Kuala Lumpur in 1997, Chicago in 1974, New York in 1930 and even in biblical times with the Tower of Babel. It's also worth noting that China is home to nine of the world’s highest 20 buildings now under construction just as its economy is hitting a wall. Coincidence?

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine lends additional support to the argument that states should make it at least somewhat difficult for parents to exempt their children from vaccinations required for school entry.

Researchers led by Emory University's Saad Omer found that from the school years 2005-2006 to 2010-2011, parents have taken advantage of nonmedical exemptions at not only an increased but also an accelerated rate. So far, resulting holes in vaccination coverage in the U.S. have enabled whooping cough and measles to make comebacks.