Long before his latest State of the State address, governor Jerry Brown has been proclaiming that California is back, and as City Journal California associate editor Ben Boychuk notes, there is some ground for optimism. The Golden State has enjoyed impressive job growth over the past three years and this year might overtake Brazil…
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A major statewide pension reform measure will not, as expected, be on the 2016 ballot. That is bad news for California’s working taxpayers. As Lawrence McQuillan notes, California accounts for $550 billion to $750 billion of the nation’s total unfunded pension liabilities. In his research for California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s…
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If you paid attention to the news from Washington, DC today, you might think that the cause of deficit reduction took a big hit today because of a number of tax cuts that were made permanent. Here’s how NPR reported the story: Once Upon A Time, Congress Cut Deficits; Now CBO Says That’s Over…
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As we have noted, governor Jerry Brown wants to drill two massive tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The total cost of his Delta conservation plan is $25 billion, but based on projects such as Boston’s “Big Dig,” and a highway tunnel project in Seattle, the cost would be much higher. A coalition…
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Imagine if you were a senior administrator at the troubled U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. You’re well aware that your institution has developed an extremely large backlog of patients seeking medical treatment, where many former military service members wait for weeks and months before receiving any care, if they’re lucky enough to get any…
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In a Detroit studio, way back in the day, Barrett Strong sang, “Money, that’s what I want.” Many artists have since covered the tune and government bureaucrats croon it every day. As David Siders shows in the Sacramento Bee, they jack up the volume around budget time. The California Department of Conservation, for example,…
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The ongoing saga of Puerto Rico’s debt problems blew up a lot bigger last week, as the U.S. territory defaulted on an additional $174 million of debt payments to its creditors on January 4, 2016, exactly five months after Puerto Rico’s government defaulted on its debt for the first time ever since the territory…
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California governor Jerry Brown is in a mood for spending. As Jon Ortiz and Dale Kasler note in the Sacramento Bee, his 2016-17 budget includes “a $1.5 billion infrastructure plan that would also remodel a portion of the Capitol.” The governor has “proposed transferring $1.5 billion from the state’s general fund to a new…
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“We never took up our lives again. We’re like at a railroad station waiting for a train that never comes in.” Those words are spoken by the character Chris Keller in Act 1 of Arthur Miller‘s 1947 play All My Sons, where he is suggesting to his mother that rather than once again revisiting…
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Politicians talk about spreading the wealth but ruling-class redistribution works best in one direction. Government takes money from the workers and gives gobs of it to government bosses, often on their way out the door. As we noted, when Jim Estep parted company with the northern California city of Lincoln he bagged a separation…
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