Rep. Tom Marino, Pennsylvania Republican, has withdrawn his name for consideration as President Trump’s drug czar. By some accounts, Marino backed legislation that restricted enforcement of opioid laws. Sen. Joe Manchin, West Virginia Democrat, who called for Marino’s withdrawal, said “we need a drug czar who has seen the devastating effects of the problem.”…
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“Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers,” reported Louis Hansen of the San Jose Mercury News. “Little or no warning preceded the dismissals,” which came after performance reviews, as the company struggles to produce its Model 3 sedan, for which 450,000 customers are waiting. Overall, Tesla showed the…
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On September 20, 2017, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico and knocked out the entire power grid of the U.S. territory. Nearly three weeks later, about 90% of the island’s electrical grid was still without power. In Puerto Rico, electrical power is solely provided to some 1.5 million households and businesses by the Puerto…
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As Lawrence McQuillan notes in California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, outlandish pensions for government employees have put state budgets in crisis and threaten the services taxpayers receive. In California, government employees could retire at age 55 with two percent of their salary for each year of state employment….
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Earlier this week, we mentioned that if a fiscally strapped local government cannot tax or cut its way out of its debt burden, and won’t take action to directly reduce its most costly liabilities, then bankruptcy is a viable third option to preserve the interests of those who reside within the government’s jurisdiction. But…
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What is your local government’s debt burden? Or in other words, how much of your local government’s annual revenue would be fully consumed by its liabilities? That’s a question that J.P. Morgan took on in its recent analyst report The ARC and the Covenants 3.0, in which it considered the total debt burdens of…
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As we noted, even with a single tunnel, Jerry Brown’s massive $16 billion “WaterFix” for the delta is a financial bust. According to Benefit-Cost Analysis of The California WaterFix, by Jeffrey Michael of the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific, construction costs, estimated at $16 billion, are still more than…
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With 59 dead and more than 500 injured, the Las Vegas massacre is beyond horrific. Even so, it could have been worse in several ways. Suppose gunman Stephen Paddock had been giving off clear warnings of his deadly intentions, which police ignored. Suppose police had intercepted communications of his mass-murder plan, then did nothing…
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Government bureaucrats like to set up special rules to benefit themselves, and nowhere has that been more evident in the past week than in the reaction to the reports of Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price’s use of taxpayer funding to charter private jets for highly questionable “business” travel. Dan Diamond…
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On Friday, September 29, 2017, after months of dysfunctional delay, the U.S. Senate finally got around to passing its own version of a budget blueprint for the U.S. government’s 2018 fiscal year, which officially got underway on Sunday, October 1, 2017. Politico‘s Sarah Ferris describes some of the politics that are built into the…
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