A new union-sponsored study lowballs today’s pension costs by around two-thirds and overstates the net costs of corporate welfare. The Washington Post’s Lydia DePillis recently reported on a new union-sponsored study from Good Jobs First that claims that corporate welfare payments from state governments dwarf the costs of public employee pensions. To begin, we shouldn’t take this corporate welfare/public...
It’s a common notion nowadays that American blue-collar workers are doomed to live out their lives on the low-paid margins of the economy. They’ve been described as “bitter,” psychologically scarred and even an “endangered species.” Americans, noted one economist, suffered a “recession” but those with blue collars endured a “depression.” Yet in recent years, according to research by...
Authorized by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 as the Higher Education Act to guarantee low-income minorities have the same opportunity for a college education as children in middle-class families, the program was renamed for Senator Claiborne Pell in 1980. Like most well-intentioned government programs, the projected costs for the new entitlement exploded and exceeded the funds...
In his recent State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama emphasized his fight to equalize our incomes. Apparently, his advisors convinced him he can breathe fresh life into tax and welfare programs by hijacking the word “opportunity” from the other side of the aisle without bothering to understand what it means. The deeper the left...
The subject of “equality” is the source of much political debate these days. Ever since the founding era, free market thinkers have argued for equality of opportunity in the economic order. Equality, in other words, is a framework, not a result. In modern terms, the goal is a level playing field. Government should be a...
Part 1 of 2: Fifty years after President Johnson launched his “war on poverty,” it is time to stop pretending and start doing something real for the poor. Mitt Romney said during the 2012 presidential campaign: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix...
A great deal has been written about the cost of welfare, rise of illegitimacy, decline in public education and racial differences in academic achievement. Very little has been written about the link between welfare and those phenomena. They are all direct results. Welfare affects a process known as maternal-infant attachments that is the psychophysiologic foundation...
January 2014 Update: Here’s a documented comparison of California taxes and economic climate with the rest of the states. The news is bad, and getting worse. But it doesn’t have to be this way! The state and local government policies that created an unaffordable California can be reversed: PERSONAL INCOME TAX: Prior to Prop 30...
“On-The-Job Deaths Spiking As Oil Drilling Quickly Expands” screams a supposed National Public Radio exposé on the “terrible price” we’re paying for the fracking revolution that has transformed the U.S. energy industry. “Last year, 138 workers were killed on the job — an increase of more than 100 percent since 2009.” The story blends chilling...
Joel Kotkin’s writing is not easily pigeonholed. Alienated from California’s Democrat and Republican parties, both of which he believes are dysfunctional, Kotkin focuses on the interests and aspirations of California’s disappearing middle class. With positions on energy and land development that challenge the conventional wisdom of Democrats, and positions on infrastructure development and other public...
What do Nobel Laureates Elfreide Jelinek, Doris Lessing, Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, Nadine Gordimer, Mother Teresa and Aung San Suukyi, Heads of State Maria Lourdes de Pintasilgo, Hanna Suchocka, Yingluck Shinawatra, Mary Robinson, Mary McAlesse, Portia Simpson Miller, Dilma Rousseff and Jerry Brown, Condoleezza Rice, Phyllis Schlafly, Matt Leinert, Matt Barkley, Bernard Parks, Kenneth...
Thirty years of political engagement in California politics has led me to the realization that the middle class is woefully underrepresented in this state. Not only that, but this injustice seems amplified with every passing year. This column has covered the lack of meaningful representation for ordinary citizen taxpayers for more than a decade. Indeed,...
When I arrived in Los Angeles almost 40 years ago, there was a palpable sense that here, for better or worse, lay the future of America, and even the world. Los Angeles dominated so many areas — film, international trade, fashion, manufacturing, aerospace — that its ascendency seemed assured. Even in terms of the urban...
The United States spends more per pupil on public education than any other country in the world, about one trillion dollars annually, but it is at the bottom of the class. In 2009, 15-year old American students ranked 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 32nd in mathematics in the PISA international assessment of academic...