California’s Coastal Commission has shut down the last beach-sand mine in the United States, operated by the Mexico-based Cemex company. Coastal Commission boss Jack Ainsworth told reporters, “This settlement is an incredible victory for the public.” Taxpayers might not think so. The Commission blamed Cemex for erosion along Monterey Bay. Company official Walker Robinson…
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The Mercatus Center has released its fiscal rankings of each state in the nation. Find your state in the map below to see how highly (or lowly) it may have ranked: Here’s what the report’s authors, Eileen Norcross and Olivia Gonzalez, had to say about the five states occupying the fiscal basement in 2015,…
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As we noted, California taxpayers were the first to pay for the sexual-reassignment surgery of a violent criminal, Shiloh Heavenly Quine, who as Rodney Quine gunned down Shahid Ali Baig, a father of three, then stole his car. Taxpayers nationwide have also been footing the bill for sex-change surgery, and Congress just decided that…
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The Congressional Budget Office has scored President Trump’s first budget proposal. In its report, the CBO finds significant reductions in the U.S. government’s annual budget deficits compared to their baseline estimates, which reflect their projections of how those deficits would have grown if the spending policies of the Obama administration had continued on autopilot….
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California Assembly Bill 1250, authored by Los Angeles Democrat Reginald Jones-Sawyer, would restrict counties from contracting out for key services. The bill is sponsored by two of the most powerful government employee unions, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). As the San Jose…
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Lobbyists seldom get much sympathy from taxpayers, but that could soon change. According to a report by Taryn Luna of the Sacramento Bee, the Asian Pacific Islander, Black, Jewish, Latino, LGBT and Women’s caucuses in the California legislature “are asking lobbying firms to provide them with demographic data – including race, ethnicity, gender and…
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After going over two years without any kind of fiscal plan, Illinois’ state government now has a budget after the state’s legislature overrode a veto by the state’s governor to impose large tax increases on the incomes of the state’s residents and corporations. Unfortunately, Illinois’ legislature made no effort to address the state’s biggest…
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Two years ago, California’s Legislative Analyst learned that 3,500 Caltrans engineers were doing little more than sitting at their desks and sought to eliminate those positions. Caltrans bosses cried foul and so did Bruce Blanning, executive director of Professional Engineers in California Government. As the union boss told reporters the Legislative Analyst was “childish,”…
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According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the U.S. Department of Education has now cumulatively borrowed over one trillion dollars from the public for the purpose of funding its Federal Direct Student Loan program since January 2009. Political Calculations’ charted the history of the Education Department’s borrowing to support its student loan business. Between January…
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As the Washington Times reports, the “Obamaphone” program, a federal government welfare gambit officially known as the “Lifeline Program,” was a massive fraud. Of the 10.6 million people with Obamaphones, a full 36 percent had dubious qualifications for the handout. Some 5,500 people had two Obamaphones and the program gave 6,400 Obamaphones to people…
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