Back on February 14, violent criminal Nikolas Cruz opened fire in a Broward County, Florida, high school, killing 17 students and wounding another 17. Superintendent Robert Runcie said this deliberate mass murder was an “accident,” and denied that Cruz had any connection with PROMISE, the “Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Intervention, Support, and Education,”…
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In a sign of how badly the increased spending contained in the 2018 omnibus spending bill that he signed into law on March 23 is going over with many in his political party, President Donald Trump is planning to try an almost never-used legislative procedure to try to retroactively cut $25 billion of spending…
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State and local governments across America are increasingly strapped for cash. One major culprit is diverting money away from the essential services they provide, including police, fire, school, road repair, and emergency services. That culprit is the excessively generous pensions and other benefits for public employees. Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times…
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California is not short on people, but many have a tough time finding an affordable place to live. The state’s housing crisis is particularly acute in cities such as San Francisco, so state senator Scott Weiner thought he would do something about it. He teamed with fellow senator Nancy Skinner to write SB 827,…
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When I was a kid, I would often come home in the afternoons after school to old reruns of episodes from the 1960s comedy Get Smart airing on a local TV station, which featured the misadventures of Maxwell Smart, a secret agent who fielded an array of high-tech spy gadgets that, aside from a…
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Every year, the General Accountability Office issues a report identifying areas where the U.S. government wastefully spends money because it has too many departments stepping all over themselves to spend money to do the same things. 2018 is no different. This year’s report highlights several opportunities to save money without any negative impact to…
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Even Jerry Brown knows that government employee pensions have put California in a bad place. Prospects for reform recently took a hit when the Senate Public Employee Retirement Committee killed John Moorlach’s SB 1031 and 1032, which would have let local governments avoid CalPERS termination fees and limited cost-of-living hikes for future employees. The…
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Scientific studies must be reproducible because replication allows others to examine the data and methodology, and the possibility of reaching different conclusions. If a study is not reproducible it is not really science at all, and that is now common, according to David Randall and Christopher Welser, authors of The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern…
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The process for setting a sound fiscal budget for the U.S. government is badly broken. So much so that the chair of the Senate’s budget committee, Mike Enzi, is suggesting that his congressional committee should be eliminated altogether. Alexander Bolton of The Hill reports on the provocative proposal: Enzi’s seemingly radical suggestion comes as…
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April 22 marks Earth Day and millennials might think it goes back at least 100 years, or maybe all the way to the nation’s founding. Actually, Earth Day started only 48 years ago in 1970, but it was an occasion of significance. As Randy Simmons, Ryan M. Yonk and Kenneth J. Sim showed in…
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