As we have noted, the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge cost $6.4 billion, $5 billion more than the original estimate, and came in ten years late. Despite the prodigious waste and delay state politicians and Caltrans bosses hailed the new span as a great victory. But problems quickly arose. Steel rods broke…
Read More »
Vallejo, California is a small city of over 115,000 people located on San Pablo Bay at the north end of the San Francisco metropolitan area, with a long history of providing lavish benefits for elected officials and government employees. So lavish, in fact, that the city was forced to file for bankruptcy back on…
Read More »
K-12 education is the biggest item in the California budget, but for California’s education cartel the state never spends enough. As this report notes, the Education Coalition, an alliance of unions, school boards and administrators, “lobbies for higher school spending continuously.” The Coalition wants to put California in the top 10 states on per-pupil…
Read More »
We said before that President Obama’s proposed budget for the federal government in its 2015 fiscal year was big and bad, but John Merlin writing at Investors Business Daily describes just how big and bad federal spending has grown: Buried deep in a section of President Obama’s budget, released this week, is an eye-opening…
Read More »
So much reporting on Obamacare ignores the failures of the so-called Affordable Care Act. One pleasant exception is Emily Bazar of the CHCF Center for Health Reporting. In a recent column she outlines what has been called Obamacare’s “kid,” “family,” or “affordability” glitch. As she notes, the federal government offers sliding-scale tax credits to…
Read More »
If the history of the Obama administration is any indication, one of the most efficient ways for the federal government to waste money is to “invest” it in green energy projects. Projects that are doomed to fail because they are nowhere near being economically viable. In fact, we could argue that the green energy…
Read More »
As we recently noted, deploying the IRS, NSA, ATF, EPA and now the FCC against Americans shows that ruling-class abuse has become inclusive. But some think the abuse is not quite inclusive enough, or severe enough. Consider, for example, this remark about critics of Obamacare. “There’s plenty of horror stories being told. All of…
Read More »
The Obama administration released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2015 earlier today. Dan Mitchell has an early reaction: There are lots of provisions that deserve detailed attention, but I always look first at the overall trends. Most specifically, I want to see what’s happening with the burden of government spending. And you probably…
Read More »
We recently noted massive dysfunction at Covered California, the state subsidiary of Obamacare, which, among other things, wasted $1.3 million on an absurd promotional video. But as Emily Bazar of the CHCF Center for Health Reporting notes, these are hardly the only problems. She writes that California paid Accenture $359 million to set up…
Read More »
The Federal Communications Commission planned a “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” that would monitor newspapers, websites and broadcast stations for the way they select stories and for their political leanings. The plan sparked enough outrage that the FCC backed off. Now various theories abound as to what the FCC may still be up…
Read More »
 |
 |
 |