In recent years, we have seen increasing emphasis on the importance of ensuring that children with disabilities have the same opportunities as other children to receive an education and education related benefits, such as school meals. Congress first addressed this concern in section 504 of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against qualified persons with disabilities in the programs or activities of any agency of the federal government's executive branch or any organization receiving federal financial assistance. For schools, these laws are enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the United States Department of Education.
Subsequently, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1990 which requires that a free and appropriate public education be provided for children with disabilities, who are aged 3 through 21, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, a comprehensive law which broadens and extends civil rights protections for Americans with disabilities. One effect of these laws has been an increase in the number of children with disabilities who are being educated in regular school programs. In some cases, the disability may prevent the child from eating meals prepared for the general school population. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) nondiscrimination regulation (7 CFR 15 (b)), as well as the regulations governing the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program, make it clear that substitutions to the regular meal MUST be made for children who are unable to eat school meals because of their disabilities, when that need is certified by a licensed physician.
In hindsight the signs of a developing housing bubble appear as clear in Spain as in the US or Ireland: Real Estate prices grew, in real teams, by over 100% between 99 and 2007. And yet up to 2007 real estate loans continued funding one of the largest real estate booms in the world, so that 860,000 housing starts took place in 2006.
Fully two thirds of the housing units built in Europe between 99 and 07 were built in Spain. By the end of all of the construction boom (end of 2008), the stock of loans to real estate developers and builders reached almost 500bn euros, equivalent to 50% of Spainms GDP. This lending bonanza appears foolish in hindsight: some investment banks now estimate that up to 50% of loans to developers will be irrecoverable.
Economic theories and models often feature ideal concepts such as perfect competition, complete markets, and lump-sum taxes. Such abstractions are useful simplifications of reality for many purposes. Most economists agree that these concepts are fictional. Monetary economics has an ideal construct of its own. It is what economists call “fiat money.” This is an object that has no intrinsic value and is not convertible into anything. An implicit assumption in the definition is that no one is forced to use such money in transactions and that the money has no other legal status whatsoever. Acceptance of such money is entirely discretionary and based exclusively on the expectation that others would accept it too, even though no one else is forced to accept it.
Interestingly, monetary economists do not claim that their “fiat money” concept is fictional. On the contrary, they completely identify it with the modern money we use in reality. Legal scholars and laypersons call the money we actually use by the same name since “fiat” refers to its status as legal tender. Monetary economists have largely ignored this status. They have proven in their models that in theory legal status is not necessary for an intrinsically useless money to circulate3. Moreover, they have claimed that legal status is not necessary in reality either. Since modern moneys do have a clear legal status4, monetary economists have based the latter claim on stories that there have been cases of non-modern moneys that were identical to the “fiat money” concept used in monetary theory. Such claims and allusions have been made by some of the most prominent monetary economists5 in almost every form of publication, and the issue serves as a very rare example of consensus in the field of monetary economics.
