From the White House on down, the National Football League is getting a bad rap over anthem antics by some players. That is a shame, because the league, the game, and the players can teach valuable lessons, particularly for those in government. If your daddy was governor of California, like Jerry Brown’s, or President…
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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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“Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week, including engineers, managers and factory workers,” reported Louis Hansen of the San Jose Mercury News. “Little or no warning preceded the dismissals,” which came after performance reviews, as the company struggles to produce its Model 3 sedan, for which 450,000 customers are waiting. Overall, Tesla showed the…
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When it comes to the amount of money that’s wasted by governments, it’s hard to beat corporate welfare for both its size and its endurance. All too often, once a company is gifted with taxpayer money to “stimulate the economy” or to “stabilize the market” or to “keep jobs here”, it opens the door…
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Imagine if land that had been held in your family for decades were suddenly subject to new environmental regulations that would severely limit what you could do on that land, where you would not be able to do things like build a new house on it, cut down trees on it, or even to…
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Two years ago, California’s Legislative Analyst learned that 3,500 Caltrans engineers were doing little more than sitting at their desks and sought to eliminate those positions. Caltrans bosses cried foul and so did Bruce Blanning, executive director of Professional Engineers in California Government. As the union boss told reporters the Legislative Analyst was “childish,”…
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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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The filing deadline has passed so taxpayers might take inventory of what government is doing with their money. By the April 28 order of U.S. District judge Jon Tigar, taxpayers will be paying for undergarments known as binders or compression tops that flatten the chest of transgender inmates at women’s prisons. Such inmates at…
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As a candidate, Donald Trump contended, “there’s tremendous waste, fraud and abuse” in the federal government, an easily verified reality. As we noted, a recent internal study exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in Pentagon business operations, where the purchasing bureaucracy alone counted 207,000 full-time workers. The Environmental Protection Agency allowed “policy advisor” John…
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With the April deadline looming, taxpayers might ponder the prospects of filing a return in which they fail to account for millions of dollars. As it happens, that is the case with a California tax agency. According to Board of Equalization member Betty Yee, who is now state controller, the BOE misallocated $47.8 million…
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