When I was a kid, I would often come home in the afternoons after school to old reruns of episodes from the 1960s comedy Get Smart airing on a local TV station, which featured the misadventures of Maxwell Smart, a secret agent who fielded an array of high-tech spy gadgets that, aside from a…
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Every year, the General Accountability Office issues a report identifying areas where the U.S. government wastefully spends money because it has too many departments stepping all over themselves to spend money to do the same things. 2018 is no different. This year’s report highlights several opportunities to save money without any negative impact to…
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Even Jerry Brown knows that government employee pensions have put California in a bad place. Prospects for reform recently took a hit when the Senate Public Employee Retirement Committee killed John Moorlach’s SB 1031 and 1032, which would have let local governments avoid CalPERS termination fees and limited cost-of-living hikes for future employees. The…
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Scientific studies must be reproducible because replication allows others to examine the data and methodology, and the possibility of reaching different conclusions. If a study is not reproducible it is not really science at all, and that is now common, according to David Randall and Christopher Welser, authors of The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern…
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The process for setting a sound fiscal budget for the U.S. government is badly broken. So much so that the chair of the Senate’s budget committee, Mike Enzi, is suggesting that his congressional committee should be eliminated altogether. Alexander Bolton of The Hill reports on the provocative proposal: Enzi’s seemingly radical suggestion comes as…
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April 22 marks Earth Day and millennials might think it goes back at least 100 years, or maybe all the way to the nation’s founding. Actually, Earth Day started only 48 years ago in 1970, but it was an occasion of significance. As Randy Simmons, Ryan M. Yonk and Kenneth J. Sim showed in…
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Many taxpayers have seen little economic gain in recent years but the salaries of government education bureaucrats “have exploded” as the Sacramento Bee reports. Sarah Koligian of the Folsom Cordova Unified School District gets $240,000 and Christopher Hoffman of Elk Grove Unified bags $330,951, more than the $324,029 of Sacramento State University boss Robert Nelson….
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Last week, the Congressional Budget Office released its annual 10-year projection for the U.S. government’s budget and economic outlook. What makes this year’s outlook stand out from previous editions is that the CBO’s analysts have taken the effects of the significant tax cuts and spending increases that have recently passed into law into its…
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The April 11 written congressional testimony of Mark Zuckerberg is already available, and what the Facebook CEO told senators on April 10 is of considerable interest. It was “my mistake,” he said, that the Cambridge Analytica firm had purloined the data of 87 million Facebook users. Zuckerberg said he was sorry and was taking…
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Three weeks ago, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to pass a bipartisan $1.3 billion spending bill that, because it eliminated the spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, guarantees the return of the kind of annual trillion dollar budget deficits that characterized much of President Obama’s tenure in office. Perhaps…
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