Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is allowing the lease of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company to expire. This will eliminate an oyster farm from the Point Reyes National Seashore and supposedly create a pristine marine wilderness. The Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, the National Parks Conservation Association, and California Senator Barbara Boxer applauded Salazar’s…
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Timely Political Calculations: Assuming that President Obama continues his policy of not negotiating in good faith with U.S. congressional leaders on federal budget matters, what might your paycheck look like in 2013 after President Bush’s 2003 income tax rate cuts expire? That matters to you because if you earn either wages or a salary…
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The election is over and as the nation advances toward the “fiscal cliff” many assume that the mortgage and financial crises are over. Some review is clearly in order. In September 2008 the federal government took over the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. During the 2012 election campaign, the U.S. Treasury Department…
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In late 2010, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the chairmen of President Obama’s bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, introduced a plan to reform both taxes and spending in Washington D.C. that would put the nation onto a path of balanced budgets and a falling national debt. At the time, the plan…
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In August 2011, President Obama signed the Budget Control Act of 2011 (or BCA), which is the law that created the so-called “fiscal cliff” that, if Washington D.C. politicians such as President Obama are to be believed, threatens potential disaster for the U.S. economy. The BCA combines income tax rate hikes on all Americans…
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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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By now, you’ll have discovered that the turkey at the center of your Thanksgiving celebration has never been more expensive. The Topeka Capitol-Journal’s Phil Anderson reports: You won’t be able to get turkeys for chicken feed this year. The cost of the big birds keeps going up, with prices at 89 cents a pound…
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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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