State Senator Marty Block, San Diego Democrat, decided not to seek a second term, but as the ever-vigilant Dan Walters notes in the Sacramento Bee, on December 5, just in time for the holidays, Block “got a lucrative consolation prize from Gov. Jerry Brown – a $146,609 per year appointment to the state Unemployment…
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This week, we’ve been focusing on how lavish pension benefits promised by the officials of local and state governments across the U.S. have combined with the extremely poor returns that those officials have realized on the pension funds they have been investing on the behalf of public employees to produce an insolvency crisis for…
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President-elect Donald Trump finds “tremendous waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, and proclaims, “we’re going to get it.” When it comes to the military, which Trump wants to rebuild, that is going to be a tough task. As Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward note in the Washington Post, “The Pentagon has buried…
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The Kersten Institute for Governance and Public Policy at Stanford University has a project that tracks the liabilities of pension funds for state government workers across the nation, where the liabilities represent the gap between the money that the pension funds hold and how much they would need in order to pay 100 percent…
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Representative Elijah Cummings, Maryland Democrat, charges that Ben Carson is “woefully unqualified” to lead the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, and even some of Carson’s supporters cite his lack of experience. For his part, Carson believes he can make a “significant contribution particularly by strengthening communities in need” and “ensuring that our…
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Property tax bills showed up back in October in envelopes reading: TAX BILL – OPEN IMMEDIATELY. Note the light touch, sort of like “hand over the wallet, Jack!” This year, many taxpayers will have to dig deeper in their wallet, but not because California’s county governments are providing them more and better services. The…
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Sanctuary cities decline to enforce U.S. immigration laws and comply with federal customs and immigration enforcement. President-elect Donald Trump’s crusade against sanctuary cities is supposed to be a blow against criminals, but as Chriss W. Street of Breitbart shows, California could suffer serious consequences. There are some 300 sanctuary cities and counties nationwide and…
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For years now, many high-ranking state and local government officials around the United States have been exceptionally generous in promising and providing big pensions to the police, firefighters, and civilian government employees in return for their their political activism and support in their communities. At the same time, they have been counting on getting…
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It’s a list that none of us wanted to see, but thanks to the wasteful spending of the federal government, one that has been dutifully assembled by U.S. Senator James Lankford: Federal Fumbles: 100 Ways the Government Dropped the Ball, Vol. 2. Like its predecessors, U.S. Senator Jeff Flake’s Wastebook (formerly produced by James…
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The United States government has deployed central planning through schemes such as the Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937. Authorized by Congress during the New Deal, the Act set up cooperative boards and conscripted growers into reserve set-asides. As we noted, in recent years the government targeted raisins in California. In 2003, Fresno raisin…
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