During winter storms back in February, the emergency spillway of the Oroville dam failed, forcing the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people. Engineers had known for decades that the rock-and-soil spillway was unreliable but did nothing. California Rep. John Garamendi said the spillway “worked fine until it had to be used.” Governor Jerry Brown said,…
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Nearly one year ago, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico officially defaulted on its debts. In response to that default, and the looming threat even larger defaults the U.S. Congress passed an emergency debt relief bill to rescue the territorial government of Puerto Rico, which President Obama signed into law on June 30, 2016….
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The forced removal of Mr. David Dao from a United Airlines flight has touched off outrage around the world, justifiably so. The airline should have adjudicated the overbooking issue before the boarding process, and as UA CEO Oscar Munoz said, nobody should ever be treated that way. The video of the removal grabbed worldwide…
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“President Trump’s proposed budget is an out and out theft from the least of us to give to those with the most.” That is Bay Area Democrat Delaine Eastin in the April 5 San Jose Mercury News. The piece notes that Eastin is a candidate for governor and a former state education superintendent but…
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The Mercatus Center’s RegData project has created a database of federal regulations and used it in some pretty interesting ways to describe their cost to both American businesses and regular Americans. One of those ways involved estimating how much time it would take to read through the entire Code of Federal Regulations at the…
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Since the middle of 2016, the city of Dallas has been dealing with a Texas-sized problem for one of its public employee pension funds. Specifically, the Dallas Police and Fire Pension System was so at risk of becoming insolvent that the city’s retired firefighters and police officers were effectively conducting a run on the…
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Last month we suggested that California’s Board of Equalization deserved a stop on the California Corruptour, modeled on the one now functioning in Mexico. The BOE, which does not equalize anything, has misallocated nearly $50 million in tax revenue. BOE members have been spending public funds to promote themselves, staging useless events, and dishing…
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As any motorist can easily verify, California’s roads are a disaster. Governor Brown and the legislature are running to the rescue with a $5.2 billion deal that will raise the tax on gasoline, raise the tax on diesel and raise user fees on motorists. California taxpayers, the most embattled in the nation, have good…
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Six years ago, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Louis A. Johnson Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia had a shortage of over 600 parking spaces, so federal officials began planning to put in a new parking garage at the facility. Six years later, all the VA had to show for all their planning…
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The Congressional Budget Office released its 2017 Long-Term Budget Outlook this week, several months ahead of its usual schedule, which is typically published every July. The most interesting part of the new long-term budget outlook appears in the report’s appendix, where the CBO’s analysts illustrate how their new outlook for the publicly held portion…
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