The California Coastal Commission (CCC) is an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of coastal counties and cities on issues of land use and property rights. As we recently noted, the powerful CCC is moving into animal management, trying to leverage SeaWorld into killing off its orca shows. As Dan Walters of the…
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California governor Jerry Brown casts himself as a visionary leader in climate change and likes to demonize the oil and gas industry. When it comes to his own property and his own interests, the governor sings a different tune. As Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press noted, according to state records, “Gov. Jerry Brown…
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At $18.61 trillion, most people think the size of the U.S. national debt is just 103% of the nation’s GDP. But according to Dave Walker, the former comptroller general of the U.S. government’s General Accounting Office, the total liabilities of the U.S. federal government add up to $65 trillion, which works out to be…
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Now that former House Speaker John Boehner’s deal with President Obama to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until March 2017 is law, the U.S. Treasury Department is ending the shell game that it was playing with the nation’s accounts and trust funds to keep the government running as if it were business as usual….
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The California State Controller, the state’s chief fiscal officer, has a mandate to “make sure the state’s $100 billion budget is spent properly.” In that cause, the Controller’s Office recently asked the state’s school districts to provide data on salaries. As Loretta Kalb notes in the Sacramento Bee, “about 70 percent of the public…
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Following the headlong rush by a bipartisan coalition of House and Senate members to jetison the only effective restraint on the growth of U.S. government spending in modern history before House Speaker John Boehner’s resignation became effective, it occurred to us that one way that we could quantify the badness of the deal is…
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In 2011, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner realized the most significant achievement of his entire career in the U.S. Congress when he reached a deal with the White House to restrain the growth of U.S. government spending: the Budget Control Act of 2011. Here, using the leverage of the threat of not…
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We have been keeping track of California’s bullet train boondoggle, or as some call it, a “Browndoggle” after governor Jerry Brown. He backs the train and wants to dig two massive tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta at an estimated cost of $25 billion. Now taxpayers learn that the bullet train also has…
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Puerto Rico is proving to be something of a case study for how politicians and bureaucrats, when finally faced with the consequences of their excessive spending as they run out of money to pay the debts they racked up to sustain it, will engage in even more unethical conduct to escape them. In today’s…
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In 1999, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee notes in a recent column, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, “abetted one of the most irresponsible political acts in state history – a massive increase in public pension benefits.” CalPERS did this by telling legislators, “the benefit increase state worker unions were seeking could be…
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