Not many of my friends or neighbors are sitting on pins and needles, worrying that the world as we know it will end as the federal government “slashes” spending as part of the automatic sequester cuts mandated by a previous budget bill. And not many people have been thinking, “Geesh, there’s nothing we need more...
What if most of the public employee compensation enhancements of the past decade or more in California were based on inaccurately optimistic government financial statements? Or to be blunt, what if government decision makers thought they could afford these compensation enhancements, because the information they relied on used accounting gimmicks that would land a person...
Editor’s Note: In a provocative recent book “The Great Rebalancing,” economist Michael Pettis writes “thanks to the internet, much of the best writing and debate has taken place in the modern equivalent of the nineteenth century’s pamphlets, broadsheets, and coffeehouse discussions – economic blogs. For many years the development and understanding of economic theory was...
As if taking a cue from California’s Governor Brown, President Obama has presented a 2013 budget to Congress that spends, taxes and borrows. It includes $1.9 trillion in new taxes and adds trillions more to our nation’s debt. Budgets which have as their foundation more government spending regardless of economic conditions, debt load or taxpayers’...
The hollowing out of Detroit is nearly complete. All that’s left is a bankrupt shell of a city with no services and scattered citizens that do not pay taxes. The Detroit News reports Half of Detroit Property Owners Don’t Pay Taxes Nearly half of the owners of Detroit’s 305,000 properties failed to pay their tax...
On Tuesday, March 5, the residents of Los Angeles went to the polls to vote on Proposition A, the PERMANENT half cent increase that will raise our sales tax to a whopping 9½%, one of the highest rates in the nation. This ballot measure, rushed to the ballot in less than two weeks without any...
One early December morning, Las Vegas police moved in on the Silverton Hotel and Casino, just off the Strip and known for its 117,000-gallon aquarium. There, having located a getaway black Audi with no license plates, they arrested 31-year-old Ka Pasasouk—a Laotian immigrant with a violent history who had eluded deportation as well as imprisonment....
Last week the California Public Policy Center published a study assessing the impact of new regulations issued by the Government Accounting Standards Board. The new ruling will require public entities to recognize unfunded pension liabilities on their balance sheets. This is a major reform. But it points to a larger issue. California’s state and local...
Individuals who oppose comprehensive and fundamental reform of public employee compensation can only be considered to be in denial. Almost every government agency in the country is going broke right now. Almost all are cutting back services and reducing staff. Government is diminishing at the state and local levels before our very eyes. Our streets...
Last month writers were all aglow on the state of finances in California. For example … The Christian Science Monitor reported Surprise! California has a budget surplus Reuters reported California Governor’s budget has surprise: a surplus Accounting Anomaly Today we learn the surprise $5-billion bump in revenue in January is likely an accounting anomaly as...
“Apres moi le deluge” Louis XV If accounting standards were peasants with pitchforks, then this quote from the last King of France to die with a head on his shoulders might well describe what lies before us. Because history may remember 2013 as the last year that public entities could hide their debts and deceive...
In the classic “sword vs. gun” scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones encounters a massive assassin ominously wielding a three-foot sword. We all remember Indy taking pause, shrugging, grabbing his pistol and killing his adversary with one shot. Simple. Effective. In the ongoing Illinois pension saga, Gov. Pat Quinn and the incoming...
One of the more astute observers of public sector union impact on government policy and government budgets is Steven Malanga, a senior fellow with the Manhattan Institute. In an article just published in City Journal entitled “The Pension Fund That Ate California,” Malanga recounts the history of CalPERS from its modest inception in 1932 to...
Here’s an interesting email from John Tillman at the Illinois Policy Institute, a non-partisan watchdog of the ongoing mess in Illinois. Tillman’s source is an excellent article on Illinois Review written by Ben VanMetre, a Senior Budget and Tax Policy Analyst at the Illinois Policy Institute. Please consider a repost of Quinn’s Illinois: regulations and...