Taxpayers in the northern California capital region wonder why their roads remain full of potholes, fire stations close down, and overall services decline. As Brad Brannan of the Sacramento Bee explains, this happens because of “rising pension costs.” An employee of the Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District can retire after 30 years, at the age…
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Back in 2012, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing installed Houdini, a $640,000 computer system designed to automate the filing of complaints. In November, 2013, Jon Ortiz of the Sacramento Bee reported that Houdini was failing to deliver improved efficiency and the DFEH “has seen a decline in the speed and quality of…
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In 2009, as part of President Obama’s signature economic policy that was passed into law as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is more popularly known as the “stimulus package,” President Obama dedicated some $7 billion for the express purpose of improving academically failing schools through School Improvement Grants (SIG). In order to…
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Inauguration Day in Washington D.C. is a day where not much happens in the U.S. government, where we can expect the real work to begin after all the pomp, circumstance, speeches, protests and parties have faded into the background noise. Since Inauguration Day 2017 is falling on a Friday, that day will come around…
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Last December, the mayor and city council of Dallas, Texas, acted to stop a run on the city’s pension program for police officers and fire fighters, as it became increasingly clear that the fund was rapidly becoming insolvent. Last week, the city’s elected leaders made their termination of the lump sum withdrawals that retired…
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For more than a decade, according to David Jensen of the California Stem Cell Report, the $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine “has given away money at a rate of $22,000 an hour, seven days a week, 24 hours a day.” Donald Kohn of UCLA got $52 million from CIRM, and his treatment…
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As Chriss Street of Breitbart News reports, California Governor Jerry Brown wants a 42 percent increase in the gasoline tax and seeks to hike Californians’ vehicle registration fees by 141 percent. These tax and fee increases are not to fix the state’s terrible roads, build more water storage, which the state desperately needs, or…
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Before anybody else climbs aboard California’s “high-speed rail” project, they might give a listen to Ralph Vartabedian of the Los Angeles Times, who has been riding herd on this boondoggle from the start. The reporter has obtained a confidential Federal Railroad Administration risk analysis charging that the bullet train could cost taxpayers 50 percent…
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Last week, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of a new budget resolution, an action that was followed by the House of Representatives a day later, as it approved the same 10-year blueprint for the future budget of the federal government. The measure is highly significant in two ways. First, it clears the legislative…
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This week, a three-judge panel of U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals laid down the law on whether government bureaucrats, in this case ones employed by Orange County, can have a free pass from having to comply with any sort of ethical standards of conduct while appearing in court as part of their official…
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