One of the overwhelming challenges facing fiscal conservatives is how to cut government spending without harming economic recovery. It may seem obvious that governments eventually have to stop relying on borrowing to finance their deficits, but eliminating government spending deficits can only partly rely on spending cuts. Economic growth is the other essential element. To...
California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a...
Two events in the past month have caused me extreme concern that one of our greatest economic errors as a nation is being repeated. I refer to the five-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing we just observed and to the decision of the Federal Reserve to defer the “tapering” of their gigantic quantitative...
Seven years ago, the California unemployment rate was virtually the same as the national rate — under 5 percent. The Golden State had seen some downs during the broad economic growth enjoyed across America since the 1980s, especially after the end of the Cold War hollowed out the defense industry in the early 1990s. But...
Hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has been used to extract oil and natural gas from shale rock for decades. But technological improvements in recent years have made the process far more efficient. It’s expanded use in states like North Dakota, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado has sparked an energy revolution that is pushing the United...
We have heard a lot from the Obama administration about the growing gap between the rich and poor among us. Less discussed by the Left however, is how middle-income families have done under this administration. What is their record? The fact is that median household income has fallen by 7% since 2007, with most of...
“Robots will steal your job, but that’s ok.” Federico Pistono Anyone who has recently driven through Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is likely to have had the memorable experience of sharing the road with a car that has nobody inside. Google’s “autonomous cars” are being tested there, and apparently they drive better...
The debate about education in this country is never more intense than on the issue of single-sex education. Once the tradition in America, it became marginalized after the feminist protests in the sixties. Title IX reforms in 1972 made coeducation in public schools a national policy. Single-sex public education became illegal and in 1996 after...
The entire education system is financially unsustainable and has been for some time. The price of education is so expensive as to make college a poor choice for many who attend, and a downright bad choice for those who go heavily in debt for degrees in little demand. The cost of education keeps rising along with:...
Among university professors, government planners and mainstream pundits there is little doubt that the best city is the densest one. This notion is also supported by a wide number of politically connected developers, who see in the cramming of Americans into ever smaller spaces an opportunity for vast, often taxpayer-subsidized, profiteering. More recently density advocates cite...
We’ve written before about the efforts of Texas Gov. Rick Perry to lure California businesses to his state, which elicited a scatological response from Gov. Jerry Brown. Relocation expert Joseph Vranich, who has done such a good jobassembling the list of California firms leaving the state, has a revealing column chronicling a further list of governors poaching in the Golden...
Suppose you are offered a bargain on a pair of well-made shoes. You can have the new footwear at half price. The catch? They don’t fit and the discount is partially paid for through your tax dollars. This is the kind of deal the public is being offered on some alternative energy vehicles. It is...
Modern California politics was forged from the Progressive Movement’s “purification” of the political machines and bosses to bring about the reform of monopolistic railroad, insurance and banking trusts that dominated the state. The Progressives reached their apogee a century ago with Gov. Hiram Johnson’s reforms of 1911, especially his initiative, recall and referendum reforms. Fast-forward...
Last week yet another missive on the lessons to be learned from Detroit’s bankruptcy was published, this time in Forbes Magazine by Jeffrey Dorfman, an economist at the University of Georgia. Dorfman’s article, “Detroit’s Bankruptcy Should Be A Warning To Every Worker Expecting A Pension, Or Social Security,” clearly implies that future Social Security benefits...