Say what you will, governments do one thing really well: create perverse incentives! Today’s example is provided by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”), which sets up a really perverse incentive for the employers of part time workers: it sends the cost of having an employee work their 30th hour in…
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Just in case anyone is thinking that it’s OK the IRS abuses its power because, after all, we need to fund the government and all the important functions its serves, you might be interested in the following. On Thursday, June 6, there will be a hearing entitled “Collected and Wasted: The IRS Spending Culture…
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“I’m not going to sit here and promise that there will not be cost growth.” That was Dan Richard, chairman of California’s high-speed rail authority, at a May 28 congressional hearing at Madera in California’s central valley. Richard’s non-promise was in vain because as rail subcommittee chairman Jeff Denham noted, enormous cost growth is…
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Every year, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (a.k.a. “the OMB”) puts together the President’s budget proposal for the U.S. federal government. Those proposals include forecasts of the amount of revenue and spending the U.S. government will have for the next five years into the future. So how good is the OMB…
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The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state’s $3 billion stem-cell institute, continues to put on a clinic on how to redistribute money to politically connected insiders. A recent federal review by the Office of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, found CIRM rife with cronyism and conflicts of interest. Almost…
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Do you really want to know just how screwed up the federal government’s priorities are? We have a great example from the four-day holiday that many government workers enjoyed during this week’s Memorial Day holiday weekend. We are informed by the media that approximately 5% of all federal workers were furloughed without pay from…
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Since the Sandy Hook massacre last year, California has introduced more than a dozen gun-control measures, headed by SB140 from state senator Mark Leno a San Francisco Democrat. This bill will confiscate handguns and assault rifles from some 20,000 Californians who acquired them legally but then through criminal convictions, restraining orders and mental illness…
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In 2009, Keynesian economists in the Obama administration were downright giddy with excitement. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed by congress was the “biggest peacetime fiscal stimulus in U.S. history” that promised to return the economy to full employment in short order. The Act’s $787 billion (equivalent to about 5% of our national output) in…
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Tesla Motors Inc. is paying back its government loan of $465 million in full, and nine years early. This is being billed as “a huge boost for the Obama administration and clean energy firms.” Actually it isn’t. It is customary to pay back loans in full, so that is hardly a news item, and…
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Did you know that the top-level bureaucrats who are doing the most to increase the negative impact of federal government spending cuts to the American people are in line to get big bonuses this year? Lindsay Wise of the McClatchy News Service reports: An elite group of federal employees is set to receive cash…
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