Kevin Drum actually makes sense on this one! Trade talks aren’t quite that bad. But they’re close. The Doha round in particular lives or dies based on the willingness of rich nations to substantially reduce tariffs and subsidies on agricultural products, and seriously, what are the odds of that? We can’t even have a serious [...]

Instapundit links to a NYT Magazine propaganda piece about governing California, and the part about taxation reads as if it were written by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, right down to euphemistically renaming taxes “revenue”: In the view of many, the origins of the mud slog began with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the [...]

Congress has been taking quite a few junkets on the taxpayer dime. Not a surprise, I know but the rate of increase (50% increase in last two years, 10x increase since 1995) is a bit of a shocker. Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal [...]

Politicians are usually most revealing when speaking off-the-cuff, and so it was with Karen Bass: Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work? A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue [...]

Imagine a private school where students sat in a math class for weeks misbehaving and learning nothing. Imagine that school gets on TV news because the administrators suspended the young lady who blew the whistle by taking a cell phone video and giving it to her mom who confronted them. Do you think that school [...]

In response to Brad’s post below, he fails to point out that the Obama Administration and Congress, with its seemingly (though not literally) infinite wealth, pushed the stimulus bill through with the explicit purpose of creating jobs and even presented the public with a graph showing unemployment with and without (pg. 5) the passage of [...]

First, let me state categorically that I don’t believe government statistics. When they talk about $X Billions of dollars spent and Y00,000 numbers of jobs created, it’s clearly BS. The government rarely knows (or cares) how much of allocated money is actually spent until they’ve run out, and I think we all know that the [...]

I’m not sure if this is a case of drinking too early in the day or willful dishonesty, but I can’t quite understand why Ezra Klein would misrepresent his opposition this badly: I’ve been trying to figure out how to make this sound like more than a cute argument, because I think it’s actually a [...]

The Governator is back. And this time, he takes no prisoners: Declaring that “California’s day of reckoning is here,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said today the state should turn its dire budget straits into an opportunity to make government more efficient. Speaking to a rare mid-year joint session of the Legislature and other constitutional officers, Schwarzenegger [...]

So what happens when you go from your PoliSci undergrad degree, float through various political and think tank jobs, begin a law degree, and have no formal training in either economics or business? You get the job of running GM! It is not every 31-year-old who, in a first government job, finds himself dismantling General [...]

When I posted the below open thread, one of the data points used to suggest things were actually recovering was a rise in income that was 0.6% higher than expect (and actually positive — expectation was negative). But it appears that this might be an anomaly brought on by our Congress. From The Big Picture: [...]

California’s in a world of hurt, exacerbated by the fact that we didn’t offer to give the state a whole bunch more money during our ballot propositions yesterday. There are a lot of reasons for our pain, but it really comes down to a state that never quite understood TANSTAAFL. They’ve been sold the lie [...]

Well, in my own mind, only until this bear market rally tanks, but I’ll get to that later. But here he goes: The bailout worked. At a relatively modest, though by ordinary standards very large ($17 billion), cost to the government, the auto companies were kept out of bankruptcy until the acute psychological phase of [...]

Like déjà vu but this time in reverse, the Colorado Senate voted down the bill which would repeal the death penalty and use the savings to fund cold case homicide investigations by a single vote*. Though the Senate stripped out the death penalty provision just 15 minutes before the scheduled vote on Monday, the conference [...]

Only 2 weeks ago the Colorado House passed H.B. 1274, a bill which would repeal the death penalty and use the savings to solve homicide cold cases, by a single vote. Foes of the bill in the Senate stripped out the death penalty repeal provisions and added an alternative source of funding to satisfy those [...]

One of these things doesn’t belong: Graph c/o Ezra Klein I’d say government would be considered “countercyclical”, but unfortunately it doesn’t shrink when the economy is growing.

The Colorado House passed the bill which would eliminate the death penalty by 1 vote. The Denver Post reports on the dramatic moment: In the hushed state House chamber, all eyes Tuesday stared up at the vote board, which showed lawmakers deadlocked 32-32 on whether to repeal the death penalty in Colorado. All but Rep. [...]

Yesterday, I linked an article about Obama “challenging” his cabinet to find $100M to cut from the budget. I suggested it would have to grow considerably to even be a drop in the bucket. One commenter named John suggested that he should do that every day for the rest of his term, and we might [...]

In news that shocks absolutely no one, the Obamessiah found yet another way to piss away some more American taxpayer dollars, this time on a “national service” bill. President Obama on Tuesday signed a bill authorizing a major expansion of funding to federal community-service programs, marking a rare example of Washington bipartisanship. The legislation reauthorizes [...]

Dear Representative Schakowsky – I’m a taxpayer.  The Tea Partiers are also taxpayers.  We are the people who make the enterprise of government possible. People in government would object to that statement.  They would say that the US Government has multiple revenue streams:  the income tax, other federal taxes, the Social Security Trust Fund, other [...]