Over the last several weeks, we’ve been watching a very strange race to the bottom between two very fiscally-troubled states, Illinois and Connecticut, where the state government of each seems intent on becoming the first U.S. state to crash its credit rating all the way down to junk status. It looks like Illinois’ state…
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Joel Kotkin, a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, charts “California’s Descent to Socialism,” a new statist strain that “more resembles feudalism than social democracy” and being advanced by, “among others, hedge-fund-billionaire-turned-green-patriarch Tom Steyer.” He wants to double down on environmental and land-use regulation but as Kotkin observes, the state’s already severe land-use…
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As we noted, California’s Board of Equalization has managed to misallocate nearly $50 million in tax revenue. BOE members have been spending public funds to promote themselves, staging useless events, and dishing out raises to high-salaried staff without performance reviews. The shabbily constructed BOE headquarters in Sacramento remains a safety threat and bottomless money…
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Economist Tyler Cowen has a thought-provoking op-ed in Bloomberg that challenges the government bureaucrat industrial complex argument that higher taxes on the rich will provide enough money to pay for every welfare program they want. Here’s perhaps the most eye-opening part of Cowen’s article: If we look at the overall fiscal position of the…
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The Financial Choice Act designed to undo Dodd-Frank financial regulations has passed the House and as it moves to the Senate opponents are crying foul over attempts to weaken the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB). Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group told Consumer Reports, “The bill would leave the successful…
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What do the citizens of San Diego, California and St. Louis, Missouri have in common? In the world of professional major league sports, both cities have recently lost their National Football League franchise, with the billionaire owners of both the San Diego Chargers and the St. Louis Rams decamping for the “greener” pastures of…
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Despite a wet winter and thick snowpack, California still faces increasing demands for water. New sources are always welcome and the Cadiz project seeks to pump groundwater from private holdings in the Mojave Desert to supply homes in arid southern California. San Bernardino County approved the project but the loudest voice against it is…
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President Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord on the grounds that it puts the energy reserves of the United States, including coal, “under lock and key” while allowing other nations to develop their coal resources and coal jobs. The Paris deal is therefore “a massive redistribution of United…
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When President Trump unveiled his official budget proposal for the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year two weeks ago, the proposal was greeted by headlines such the following from Bloomberg: Trump to Pitch Deep Cuts to Anti-Poverty Programs, Medicaid Or the following headline from the New York Times: Trump’s Budget Cuts Deeply Into Medicaid The…
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There is a sad race underway between two fiscally-troubled states in the Union, where the state governments of both Connecticut and Illinois appear intent on becoming the first full U.S. state to file for the equivalent of bankruptcy. Just over a week ago, Connecticut took a strong step backward toward reaching that status first…
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