The California Department of Motor Vehicles is a massive bureaucracy whose legendary inefficiency is on the increase but which some pundits see as a model for government monopoly health care. Mariam Noujaim works for the DMV and is a member of the 2.1 million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the more…
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Nobel laureate and columnist Paul Krugman says he is looking forward to health care as run by the Department of Motor Vehicles, based on his own swift and courteous experience with that agency. At the same time, he says, his own dealings with private health care have been a bureaucratic nightmare. Krugman’s evidence was…
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As we noted in July, the California Parks Department managed to hide $54 million for 12 years. For more than a decade, the California Department of Finance, responsible for such matters, failed to find the money. But apparently performance has improved. The same Finance Department managed to find an additional $1.4 billion available for…
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In October we noted that the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) had recently defaulted on a $5.6 billion mandate to pre-fund retiree health benefits, the second time in two months the USPS had failed to deliver. In August it failed to make a $5.5 billion retirement prepayment slated for last September, which Congress conveniently deferred….
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It’s not exactly news that the United States harbors an enormous number of people on welfare. By one account, more than 100 million Americans are on at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And despite the 1996 welfare reforms, the number of adults on foods stamp skyrocketed from an already high…
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In the mid-1800s, Sutter Creek and Amador City were centers of the California gold rush. Now for the first time in 50 years the Mother Lode is again the scene of mechanized mining. The Sutter Gold Mining Co. operates a modern $20 million complex, complete with ventilated tunnels, laboratories and a mill. The operation…
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Among her many devastations, Hurricane Sandy swamped the port of Newark and managed to submerge 16 Fisker Karma electric hybrid automobiles, which then caught fire and exploded. Fisker could not explain the sudden combustion, not the first problem for the company touted by President Obama, and which received federal loan guarantees of $529 million…
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As this column shows, government waste, fraud and abuse is rampant at all levels. Seldom, however, has any politician attempted to give divine sanction to government greed in the style of California Governor Jerry Brown, who once wanted a California space program and recently signed off on a $68 billion railroad train. The former…
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In 2007, energy researchers at Colorado State University created AVA Solar, which became Abound Solar of Loveland, Colorado, with manufacturing facilities in Tipton, Indiana. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, touted Abound Solar as an example of the clean-energy future, claiming it would create 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs. Members of…
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Shimon is a robot with four arms who plays marimba, bobs his head, and can reportedly improvise like Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. Shimon’s inventors at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology claim that he morphs the styles of the jazz masters and produces novel, surprising arrangements. Shimon’s brief recital at this site…
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