Summer will soon be here, and with all the fuss about global warming one would think Americans could avail themselves of the most protective sunscreens, like those used by their counterparts in Europe. They won’t be able to do that because, as this Washington Post report notes, “applications for the newer sunscreen ingredients have…
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The Obama administration promised to be the most transparent administration in U.S. history, but according to a recent report by the Associated Press, the reverse might be true. More often than ever, the administration “censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, cited more…
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Nate Silver is perhaps best known for being one of the most accurate election forecasters in the U.S., where he has applied statistical methods originally developed to analyze sports to determining the most likely outcome of elections. Previously hosted by the New York Times, Silver has recently relaunched his FiveThirtyEight blog with ESPN, where…
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California governor Jerry Brown is an ardent supporter of the state’s high-speed rail project and as this report shows, he has now come up with a new reason for it. “There’s a lot of old people who shouldn’t be driving,” he recently told some union bosses in Sacramento. “They should be sitting in a…
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Normally, whenever the subject of universities and debt comes up, the topic is student loans, which as we’ve previously discussed, have skyrocketed in recent years. But that problem with debt might not be limited to just students. Forbes‘ Josh Freedman writes about a unique change in the rankings for the University of California (UC):…
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Since it began its various quantitative easing programs several years ago, the U.S. Federal Reserve has become one of the largest creditors to the United States federal government, funding around half of the massive amount of debt issued by the U.S. Treasury to sustain government spending at greatly elevated levels since 2009. Having become…
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The media love anniversary stories, but last month the fifth anniversary of President Obama’s stimulus package slipped by without much fanfare. Taxpayers might recall how, in 2008, spending on the order of $800 billion was urgently called for and delivered. But it failed to stimulate much economic growth. In the last three months of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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