Recent hearings on the Secret Service by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee proved entertaining and educational. For example, in 2011 someone had fired shots at the White House but Secret Service bosses wrote this off as a car backfiring, rather unlikely since all cars now have fuel injection. And even with carburetors,…
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The national debt is that it is so big that it can be difficult to describe the magnitude of the nation’s liabilities in terms that make sense on a human scale. That didn’t stop Mick Teufel from trying, though! Here’s his attempt to describe the size of the national debt using the metaphor that…
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A high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco could have been built privately. That remarkable admission comes from none other than Jeff Morales, CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, in an interview with Allen Young of the Sacramento Business Journal. The article, titled “Why Does California’s High-Speed Rail Need Public Money?”,…
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In international politics, the Group of 7, or G-7, is made up of the world’s seven most industrialized economies, which include the United States, Japan, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Rebecca Strauss of the Council of Foreign Relations recently compared how the national debt of the United States changed with respect…
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As we noted, governments indulge their own form of insider trading through cronyism and nepotism. In California’s capital, that was on display with longtime Senate human-resources boss Dina Hidalgo. Her practice was not to give jobs to those most qualified. Rather, she gave jobs to her own son, Gerardo Lopez, other family members, and…
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Most journalists aren’t aware of this, but “food deserts” in the United States are a hoax. A food desert has been arbitrarily defined as an area in which at least 20 percent of the households have incomes that put them below the federal poverty line, before receiving any welfare benefits or considering public transportation…
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The new school year has kicked off but many students, particularly African Americans in the inner cities, remain interned in dysfunctional and dangerous schools. This is not an accident. Those are the very schools that legislators, bureaucrats, and government employee union bosses want for low-income students. In government education, money goes directly to the…
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Is there a completely painless way to cut wasteful government spending without having to give up the perceived benefits of the spending? The answer, of course, is yes! By clamping down on corruption and other ethically questionable practices by politicians and bureaucrats, regular Americans could benefit by both reducing government spending and making it…
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In December 2013, one of the biggest successes for opponents of wasteful government spending took place: the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for the government subsidy–dependent wind-power industry expired, which would progressively save U.S. taxpayers up to $12 billion as no new wind-energy development projects could claim it. It was an event we noted earlier…
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Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru, notes in his book Global Crossings that workers from many nations tend to migrate in search of employment opportunities and prosperity. In the new book A Race for the Future, Cuban native Mike Gonzalez shows how, from the 1940s into the 1960s, the Bracero program allowed Mexican…
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