Not long ago, we looked at the situation where politicians and bureaucrats use their authority to regulate economic activity to impose costs on regular Americans. In doing that, we noted the role of the “corporate cronies”, who use push for government regulation as a means to put their market competitors at a disadvantage so…
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Most Americans have completed their tax returns and may even have got back some of their own money. Now they should get out the government cost calculator again because as Kelly Cohen reports in the Washington Examiner, last year the IRS gave out between $13.3 billion and $15.6 billion in improper payments. That amounted…
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If you count up the number of civilians who work for the U.S. federal government, you’ll find that nearly one out of eight work for the Department of Veterans Affairs, primarily in the federal government-run, single payer-style health care and hospital system that has been established to specifically deal with the medical needs of…
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As we have noted, the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge cost $6.4 billion, a full $5 billion more than the original estimate, and the project came in ten years late. The delay of a decade, however, was not sufficient to resolve serious safety problems with the bridge. Those were the subject of…
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Most taxpayers will be unfamiliar with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), but they might want to get up to speed for several reasons. The NTIA is “the Executive Branch agency that is principally responsible by law for advising the President on telecommunications and information policy issues.” The NTIA’s programs and policymaking focus…
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How much does the average American household spend to cover the cost of government regulations? Answering that question can be difficult, because Americans pay that cost every time they make any kind of transaction. Because it’s a cost of doing business, it gets directly passed along to every consumer and is incorporated into the…
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Insider trading is normally conducted by individuals with access to public companies’ information. But as this report notes, governments also conduct “insider trading in jobs” as shown by the case of Gerardo Lopez, a sergeant-at-arms in the California Senate. In 2012 Lopez was involved in a gunfight at his house that left one person…
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George Will writes of a new state-based initiative to amend the U.S. Constitution to regain control over the federal government’s spending: From the Goldwater Institute, the fertile frontal lobe of the conservative movement’s brain, comes an innovative idea that is gaining traction in Alaska, Arizona and Georgia, and its advocates may bring it to…
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Taxpayers prone to wonder why government is so wasteful should take a hard look at government-employee pensions in general and the practice of double-dipping in particular. As this report notes, Bill Carnahan, head of the Southern California Public Power Authority, took both his full-time salary and his pension at the same time, and he…
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A cartoon, like a picture, is worth a thousand words. Nonetheless, I’ll risk adding a few more to this one. In case you haven’t heard, French economist Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” is a runaway best seller. In Professor Piketty’s view, under capitalism, the rich get richer (because they own the…
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