“More than a year after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law he said would tamp down pension spiking,” noted Jon Ortiz in the Sacramento Bee, “the state’s biggest public pension fund is on the verge of adopting rules critics say would undermine its intent.” That pension fund, CalPERS, went on to adopt the new…
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Does government spending on big infrastructure projects really increase economic growth in the long run? That’s an important question, because governments will often borrow large sums of money for the sake of building major infrastructure projects as they sell taxpayers on the notion that they’ll be rewarded with higher economic growth over time — particularly…
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What would happen if prominent income-inequality theorists, such as economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Peter Diamond, could get their way and hike the topmost marginal income tax rate in the United States to 80%? Would the nation enter into an enlightened state of economic nirvana as they claim? Or would things perhaps turn…
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In January, the United States Postal Service hiked the price of stamps and its package shipping increased, but as Reuters reports, “The U.S. Postal Service continued to bleed money during its second quarter.” From April to June, the USPS lost $2 billion, compared with $1.9 billion in the first quarter and $740 million in…
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If taxpayers have any doubt that government is becoming ever more intrusive, they might check out how California is attempting to redefine consensual sex. This legislative attempt is based on the notion that there is some part of the word “No!” that college students, allegedly the best and brightest, fail to understand. Driving the…
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The single most expensive item for which the Medicare welfare program will pay claims is a power wheelchair. In 2008, Medicare “paid” for 158,185 power wheelchairs at a cost of over $490.4 million, or an average cost of $3,100.37 per power wheelchair. By contrast, the second most expensive medical line item that Medicare will…
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The Social Security Trustees have just released their 2014 report, which updates their actuarial estimates of when the program’s Disability Insurance (DI) trust fund and the Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI) trust fund will run out of money, forcing both disability and pension benefits to be cut. Let’s get to the worst news…
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The ruling class likes to portray its predations as targeting the rich, the one percent, and those at the top. In reality, the Pillage People target everybody, particularly working people. For example, in January, government regulations will cause California’s already high gasoline prices to jump 13 to 20 cents a gallon. This is the…
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We have been tracking the new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget but still bristled with safety concerns. Those worries were serious enough to prompt state senator Mark DeSaulnier to hold hearings and threaten a criminal investigation. Calls for a criminal investigation…
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Can governments simply use inflation to make their national debts disappear? That’s the subject of a new working paper by Jens Hilscher, Alon Raviv, and Ricardo Reis, who used real-world data to see how effective that inflation might be in reducing the real value of a government’s outstanding liabilities. Here’s the abstract of the…
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