In California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, Lawrence McQuillan discovered that California accounts for $550 billion to $750 billion of the $4.7 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities nationwide. The biggest player is the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) which in 1999 assured legislators that its investment earnings would…
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The Pentagon deploys the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) to guard the nation from cruise missiles and other low-flying threats. JLENS primary contractor, Raytheon, says the system is proven capable and performing well right now, but as David Willman notes in the Los Angeles Times, taxpayers might have…
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a lot of problems. For instance, the federal government department has had to tell its employees to stop defecating in its office hallways. The agency’s top expert on climate change is currently serving time in federal prison for collecting a paycheck for years without actually doing any work….
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Jay Obernolte of the Los Angeles Times asked a question that nearly every California resident who has traveled in a car almost anywhere in the state at almost anytime in recent decades might also have asked: “Why are California’s roads so bad?” Given that Californians pay about 40% more in taxes and fees than…
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What benefit does China get for being the largest single foreign lender of money to the U.S. federal government? Well, if Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar is right, the biggest benefit may be that China gets the right to set the course for U.S. monetary policy. Foroohar writes: In important ways, China now controls U.S….
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California is the least tax-friendly state according to new rankings from Kiplinger. Much of that unfriendliness is due to the 2012 Proposition 30, which imposed the highest income tax rate in America, 13.3 percent, and also raised the sales tax to 7.5 percent, also highest in the nation. Proposition 30 was pitched as a…
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As we noted in 2013, California’s government employee unions are so confident of their power that they demonstrate in front of the capitol chanting “This is our house!” They were right then and are still right now, as a Sacramento Bee editorial explains. Senate Bill 376 by Ricardo Lara is “a sop to the…
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We’re always on the lookout for creative ways to describe the state of the U.S. national debt and the factors that affect it. Today’s exercise in data visualization comes to us via the Twitter feed of DonDraperClone, who has assembled several charts showing some of the biggest drivers of the U.S. government’s total public…
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As Lawrence McQuillan has observed, unfunded pension liabilities have soared to $4.7 trillion nationwide, and California accounts for $550 billion to $750 billion of the total. CalPERS, the Golden State’s biggest public pension fund, has authorized 99 types of special payments that count in pension calculations, but the only one that drew any objection…
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The Washington Times reports on a dubious achievement by the U.S. government: In the first 11 months of fiscal year 2015, the amount of taxes collected by the federal government outpaced the first 11 months of all previous fiscal years, even after adjusting for inflation. The 2015 fiscal year begins Oct. 1, 2014, and…
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