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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In 2004, nearly 54 percent of California voters approved Proposition 63, the Mental Health Services Act. State senate boss Darrell Steinberg, the measure’s original sponsor, wants President Obama to use it as a model for the nation. That is a bad idea, just like Proposition 63 itself. The measure slapped an additional 1 percent…
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As this column shows, government waste, fraud and abuse is rampant at all levels. Seldom, however, has any politician attempted to give divine sanction to government greed in the style of California Governor Jerry Brown, who once wanted a California space program and recently signed off on a $68 billion railroad train. The former…
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Edward P. Lazear (former Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisors; Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics, Stanford University; Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution) proposes significant spending cuts, no tax increases, and most importantly—adoption of rule-based constraints on future government spending. What do you think—is limiting growth in government…
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The New York Times has a wonderful tool for understanding how the recommendations of the presidential deficit commission could work to close the estimated annual budget shortfalls in the future. You simply go through and select spending cuts and tax increases until the budget shortfall is corrected for both in the present and future….
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