Uniforms are a big deal at the U.S. Department of Defense for outfitting the members of the nation’s military branches, particularly its Battle Dress Uniforms (BDUs), which incorporate camouflage among other technologies to help protect the lives of American service members who will be engaged in combat operations. As part of that mission, the…
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Social Security’s Trustees have released their annual report for 2017, which updates their view of the fiscal health of the single largest government program in the United States. To provide some sense of scale, the program paid out $922 billion to 61 million Americans in 2016, for an average benefit of over $15,000 per…
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U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions seeks a “new directive on asset forfeiture” and plans new policies to “increase forfeitures.” The target is supposedly big-time criminal organizations but all citizens have good cause to be wary. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas notes, the issue is “whether modern civil-forfeiture statutes can be squared with…
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Illinois has kicked the can down the road for the state’s debts and liabilities. Last week, Moody’s credit rating service announced that it would sustain its current rating for the state of Illinois at Baa3, one level above “junk” status, making Moody’s the third of three major credit rating agencies to not take the…
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While running for office, Donald Trump pledged to reduce the regulatory burden for Americans while also increasing the amount of spending to support federal law enforcement agencies in their work, much of which involves enforcing federal laws and regulations. Budgets are about priorities, so perhaps it isn’t much of a surprise that President Trump’s…
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California’s Coastal Commission has shut down the last beach-sand mine in the United States, operated by the Mexico-based Cemex company. Coastal Commission boss Jack Ainsworth told reporters, “This settlement is an incredible victory for the public.” Taxpayers might not think so. The Commission blamed Cemex for erosion along Monterey Bay. Company official Walker Robinson…
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The Mercatus Center has released its fiscal rankings of each state in the nation. Find your state in the map below to see how highly (or lowly) it may have ranked: Here’s what the report’s authors, Eileen Norcross and Olivia Gonzalez, had to say about the five states occupying the fiscal basement in 2015,…
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As we noted, California taxpayers were the first to pay for the sexual-reassignment surgery of a violent criminal, Shiloh Heavenly Quine, who as Rodney Quine gunned down Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, then stole his car. Taxpayers nationwide have also been footing the bill for sex-change surgery, and Congress just decided that…
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The Congressional Budget Office has scored President Trump’s first budget proposal. In its report, the CBO finds significant reductions in the U.S. government’s annual budget deficits compared to their baseline estimates, which reflect their projections of how those deficits would have grown if the spending policies of the Obama administration had continued on autopilot….
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California Assembly Bill 1250, authored by Los Angeles Democrat Reginald Jones-Sawyer, would restrict counties from contracting out for key services. The bill is sponsored by two of the most powerful government employee unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). As the San Jose…
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