As recent congressional hearings confirmed, the Internal Revenue Service can be very efficient when it comes to voter suppression. But when it tries to fight tax fraud the IRS is something of a bust, as the story of Carol Cooke confirms. Cooke has lived at her Long Island home for 37 years. In…
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Last week Senate leaders struck a deal to preserve the filibuster but this was much more than a question of procedural traditions. The tradeoff called for confirmation votes on President Obama’s nominees to head various federal agencies. So the Senate proceeded to confirm Richard Cordray as the first permanent director of the Consumer Financial…
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We recently noted that government employee unions call the California capitol “our house.” Evidence is mounting that government unions do indeed own the place. Their mass rally in June was for a pay raise and to the surprise of nobody the politicians they worked so hard to elect gave them exactly what they wanted…
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It’s not clear how much economic development the federal Economic Development Administration, a division of the Commerce Department, actually produces. But the Commerce Department’s inspector general has some observations about the administration’s performance after a cyber attack that turned out to be bogus. “EDA’s persistent, mistaken beliefs resulted in an excessive response and ultimately…
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The National Transportation Safety Board says it will be months before they fully determine why Asiana flight 214 crash landed at San Francisco on July 6. The crash also disturbed other federal security agencies, for a strange reason. Bob Clifford, an aviation attorney whose firm has handled a number of air disaster cases, told…
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UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest health insurer, and Aetna, another major insurer, recently abandoned California’s individual health insurance market. This ran as a business story but it’s really about Obamacare. The companies’ departure from the individual market is clearly a response to the Affordable Care Act, and that departure has already made it harder…
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Calculating the cost of government is a difficult task but as a general rule the costs will always be higher than taxpayers imagine. A California case shows why this is so. Pension plans, including those in government, include contributions by the employer and the employee. The employee contribution of Susan Muranishi, an administrator in…
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When something as big as Medicare makes decisions the consequences involve more than health care. For example, in April the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) made a decision to increase funding to the private-sector Medicare Advantage program by $8 billion. That decision was worth billions to private health insurers, and as the…
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We noted in March that California’s Board of Equalization jacked up the excise tax on gasoline by nearly 9 percent, 3.5 cents, to 39.5 cents a gallon. That tax hike takes effect today, July 1, and has nothing to do with market forces. The Board of Equalization, a tax agency, approved the excise tax…
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In early June the government sold 30 million shares of GM, a move doubtless timed with GM’s return to the S&P 500 index, a position the auto giant lost in 2009 when it filed for bankruptcy reorganization. But as Business Week noted, as of April 30 the federal government still held 241.6 million GM…
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