Corey Lewandowski, an outside advisor to Donald Trump, wants the president to fire federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau boss Richard Cordray. Lewandowski doesn’t like CFBP rules that make it easier to sue finance companies, but firing Cordray will not be easy. He can only be fired for cause, and that entails a burden of…
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Two years ago, as we noted, California’s high-speed rail project was facing 36 miles of tunnels through the mountains north of Los Angeles, a tectonically complex area abounding in earthquake faults. As independent experts observed, these tunnels would have been the most ambitious tunneling project in U.S. history, with 90% odds of massive cost…
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As Lawrence McQuillan notes in California Dreaming: Lessons on How to Resolve America’s Public Pension Crisis, outlandish pensions for government employees have put state budgets in crisis and threaten the services taxpayers receive. In California, government employees could retire at age 55 with two percent of their salary for each year of state employment….
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As we noted, even with a single tunnel, Jerry Brown’s massive $16 billion “WaterFix” for the delta is a financial bust. According to Benefit-Cost Analysis of The California WaterFix, by Jeffrey Michael of the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific, construction costs, estimated at $16 billion, are still more than…
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As the Washington Times reports, the “Obamaphone” program, a federal government welfare gambit officially known as the “Lifeline Program,” was a massive fraud. Of the 10.6 million people with Obamaphones, a full 36 percent had dubious qualifications for the handout. Some 5,500 people had two Obamaphones and the program gave 6,400 Obamaphones to people…
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California has added Texas, Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota to its travel ban. State attorney general Xavier Becerra made the announcement accompanied by representatives from the ACLU and Equality California, which apparently fancy themselves part of government. California’s AB1887, enacted last year, purports to ban state employees from travelling to states perceived to discriminate…
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California’s vaunted bullet train has yet to carry a single passenger but it has managed to make the news. As it turns out, the state’s High-Speed Rail Authority offered a contract extension of $3 million on a noncompetitive basis. In other words, it was a no-bid sweetheart deal. That emerged in a new report…
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President Obama is vacationing in Hawaii, the state where he was born and spent his childhood. According to Anita Kumar of McClatchy News, this annual trip cost taxpayers $3.5 million and the total cost of the first family’s travel comes to $85 million, possibly $90 million when further records are released. All told, except…
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With the revelations of the past weeks, the third presidential debate is sure to be one of the best shows in Las Vegas. Many observers have already had enough of the Clinton-Trump spectacle, but there are still some important things to look for. Observers might examine the candidates’ statements for some sense of the…
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The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention draws a budget of more than $11 billion for the purpose of, as the name implies, controlling and preventing diseases. The mammoth CDC, however, is always eager for mission creep. In the 1990s it spent $2.6 million to study “gun violence,” which is not, strictly speaking,…
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