In August 2011, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 (or BCA), which is the law that created the so-called “fiscal cliff” that, if Washington D.C. politicians such as President Obama are to be believed, threatens potential disaster for the U.S. economy. The BCA combines income tax rate hikes on all Americans…
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles is a massive bureaucracy whose legendary inefficiency is on the increase but which some pundits see as a model for government monopoly health care. Mariam Noujaim works for the DMV and is a member of the 2.1 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the more…
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Nobel laureate and columnist Paul Krugman says he is looking forward to health care as run by the Department of Motor Vehicles, based on his own swift and courteous experience with that agency. At the same time, he says, his own dealings with private health care have been a bureaucratic nightmare. Krugman’s evidence was…
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By now, you’ll have discovered that the turkey at the center of your Thanksgiving celebration has never been more expensive. The Topeka Capitol-Journal’s Phil Anderson reports: You won’t be able to get turkeys for chicken feed this year. The cost of the big birds keeps going up, with prices at 89 cents a pound…
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As we noted in July, the California Parks Department managed to hide $54 million for 12 years. For more than a decade, the California Department of Finance, responsible for such matters, failed to find the money. But apparently performance has improved. The same Finance Department managed to find an additional $1.4 billion available for…
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In October we noted that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) had recently defaulted on a $5.6 billion mandate to pre-fund retiree health benefits, the second time in two months the USPS had failed to deliver. In August it failed to make a $5.5 billion retirement prepayment slated for last September, which Congress conveniently deferred….
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What happens when public employee unions begin calling too many of the shots in government? Reuters reports on the backstory of the city of San Bernandino, California’s bankruptcy, which features a lot of politicians blaming everyone else for their dilemma: Yet on close examination, the city’s decades-long journey from prosperous, middle-class community to bankrupt,…
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It’s not exactly news that the United States harbors an enormous number of people on welfare. By one account, more than 100 million Americans are on at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And despite the 1996 welfare reforms, the number of adults on foods stamp skyrocketed from an already high…
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In the mid-1800s, Sutter Creek and Amador City were centers of the California gold rush. Now for the first time in 50 years the Mother Lode is again the scene of mechanized mining. The Sutter Gold Mining Co. operates a modern $20 million complex, complete with ventilated tunnels, laboratories and a mill. The operation…
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He won’t be the Vice President of the United States anytime soon, but he will still be chairman of the House Budget Committee and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, so the following excerpts from The Onion’s parody “Paul Ryan Releases 90-Minute High-Endurance Budget Slashing Video” still work – enjoy! WASHINGTON—Republican…
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