The USC College Republicans hosted a panel discussion Wednesday night focusing on President Barack Obama’s policies and actions regarding the U.S. economy, the recent health care reform bill and the state of the country’s foreign relationships. Read more
As California cities and counties struggle to fulfill the generous pay and pension commitments that they made to public employees during flush economic times, some politicians have taken comfort in a usually forbidding word: bankruptcy. Top officials in Los Angeles and San Diego have raised the B-word in recent weeks, and almost everyone is paying attention to developments in Vallejo (population 117,000), on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. Read more
Anytime immigration comes up in public debate, you can be sure there will be arguments that America should tighten its borders. However, in a global world where capital moves at will, and investors can and do take their money out of the U.S. to fund innovative ideas overseas, the concept of attracting people with entrepreneurial talent to America makes a lot of sense. Read more
Reps. Jeb Hensarling and Mike Pence recently called for a constitutional amendment limiting federal spending “to one-fifth of the economy.” Bruce Bartlett, a former official in the George H.W. Bush administration, promptly denounced the idea as “dopey,” one “terrible… on so many levels that it is hard to know where to begin to dissect it….” Read more
John R. Graham, the director of health care studies for San Francisco's Pacific Research Institute, has been a critic of the national health overhaul law - not surprising, considering the institute is a free-market think tank. Graham answered three questions posed by reporter Victoria Colliver. Read more
Problems with a California temperature monitoring station represent in microcosm why the supposedly settled issue of climate change has become so unsettled in the last few months. Read more
In 2008, Vallejo, Calif., was nearly broke. Faced with falling tax revenues, rising pension costs, and unmovable public-employee unions, the city was unable to pay its bills and declared bankruptcy. Read more
Forget the stereotype of the lobbyists shilling for corporate welfare in the polished corridors of K Street. The biggest single market for the lobby industry is government itself, as state entities try to get (or keep) money and privileges flowing from legislatures. Read more
SACRAMENTO – One of the most unusual vote-buying scams the Obama administration may have used to pass its health care socialization plan was an alleged promise to two Democratic congressmen to increase federal water supplies to the San Joaquin Valley. Read more
As John R. Graham, director of Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute, reminds us, the 1965 Medicare and Medicaid amendments to the Social Security Act of 1935 enjoyed greater than 70% majorities in each congressional chamber. Social Security also passed with majorities of both parties in both chambers. Read more
With the passage of the health "reform" bill, President Obama, House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have ensured
that the American economy and America's household economics are in for
a rough decade. Read more
"You're just going to throw seniors out of Medicare Advantage and throw them onto traditional Medicare," said John Graham, director of health care studies for the Pacific Research Institute, a free-market think tank based in San Francisco. Read more
According to news reports, Escalante, 79, is in poor health and unable to walk. But
after all these years, his accomplishments in Los Angeles, and his
teaching philosophy, can still stand and deliver - if students are
willing to do their part.
With the Democrats’ health-care legislation having cleared the last legislative hurdle, it is all but inevitable that President Obama will be signing it into law. Is this the end of the road for the debate, or is there a way forward for real reform that puts decisions into the hands of health-care consumers rather than the government? National Review’s panel of health-care watchers weighs in. Read more
Hawaii's Congressional delegation is committed to a massive
reorganization of health insurance by the federal government. This
mission is about to collide with state budgets, causing much collateral
damage. Read more
Increased physical activity leads to better student behavior, improved attentiveness, and higher attendance rates. There are nonpublic-sector organizations that are working to close this facilities and equipment gap.
For example, the Sound Body Sound Mind Foundation has placed fitness
equipment in 60 charter and regular public schools in the Los Angeles
area. Read more
Discussing whether Dems are relying too much on higher taxes to pay for
health care reform, with Gov. Howard Dean, former Democratic National
Committee chairman; Sally Pipes, Pacific Research and CNBC's Hampton
Pearson. Read more
When people ask why I moved to Sacramento to write about California's
notoriously dysfunctional government, I say that, in the next two or
three years, the government here is likely to (figuratively) crash and
burn and that, as a journalist, I want a front-row seat for the action. Read more
Today the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a free-market think tank based in California, released a first-of-its-kind report on the potential cost of increased federal control of health insurance. Read more
Federal lawmakers pondering how to vote on Obama-Care this week should notice that Massachusetts is back asking Washington for hundreds of millions more to bail out its universal health-coverage system...
The Obama administration continues to push for health care reform and
other measures that will require higher taxes. But is such activism
largely to blame for the prolonged economic slump? Robert Miller says
the government can create jobs by throwing money at but the question is
where do those resources come from?
Read more
Tort reform is a popular call-to-action when
it comes to healthcare legislation. In general tort reform in the
healthcare arena refers to reducing lawsuits or damages related to
medical malpractice... Read more
Here’s a little intra-mural squabble that I haven’t gotten into much on this site: Is support for an individual insurance mandate compatible with consumer-driven health care? I’ve periodically linked to Who Killed Health Care?, a book by Regina Herzlinger, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and professor at the Harvard Business School. Read more
The theory of the big (but good) lie goes back to a certain reading of Plato’s most famous dialogue, the Republic. There are more or less crude versions of it, but the gist of the theory is that for reasons of state — that is, so as to secure the chances of the ruler to rule smoothly — telling lies can be justified and may even be necessary. Read more
With perhaps a third of practicing physicians threatening to "Go Galt" should ObamaCare pass, it's easy to overlook another potentially devastating effect of this monstrosity: "Nevada, Hawaii, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Georgia will see significant reductions in dollars available to fund Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Programs."
Promised pensions benefits for public-sector employees represent a massive overhang that threatens the financial future of many cities and states. Read more
California has the largest state economy, and the state Capitol jostles with players seeking a piece of the action. The biggest single lobbyist, however, is not Wal-Mart, Apple, Toyota, the entertainment industry or some fat-cat Jack Abramoff figure. The biggest lobbyist is government itself. Read more
The nation’s largest state was not among the 15 states and the District of Columbia chosen to advance in the competition for a share of Race to the Top funds, the Obama administration’s $4.35 billion pot of education-stimulus gold. School reformers in California said they were not surprised. Read more
California has the largest state economy, and the state Capitol jostles with players seeking a piece of the action. The biggest single lobbyist, however, is not Wal-Mart, Apple, Toyota, the entertainment industry or some fat-cat Jack Abramoff figure. The biggest lobbyist is government itself.
Despite intense, sometimes contentious negotiations — most recently at a meeting of world leaders in Denmark — the likelihood of a binding deal on global carbon emissions appears remote. Virtually all nations agree about the potential severity of climate change, but tremendous apprehension remains about how best to fight global warming. Read more
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Read more
With California teetering on insolvency, government union activists and liberal legislators are trying to whip the public into a "please tax us more" frenzy by scaring people about the consequences of spending cuts. Read more
Today the Pacific Research Institute (PRI), a free-market think tank based in California, released a breakthrough study on taxpayer-funded lobbying, or government to government lobbying. Read more
Effective policy approaches should be similar for both the U.S. and Japan even though their economies differ in important respects, said Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow of the Pacific Research Institute. Read more
California's bond rating is the country's lowest. The state faces near unprecedented unemployment and underemployment. State government and most counties face deficits for the foreseeable future. The solution to this predicament, some Sacramento politicians believe, is more taxes. Read more
Despite the recent news that California wasn't chosen by the Obama administration as a finalist state for the $4 billion Race to the Top education-funding program, with its required adherence to new national standards in English and math, the state will still be forced to dance to the president's nationalizing tune. Read more
During his 35th speech on health care at the White House last Wednesday, President Obama called on Congress to give his reform package an "up-or-down vote" before the Easter recess, with or without Republican support. Read more
California's union-dominated, Democratic-controlled Legislature is temperamentally incapable of fixing the state's structural budget deficit, given that such a fix would require reduced government spending and the granting of fewer benefits to the state's class of government workers. Read more
President Obama has been talking tough on deficit reduction, but many left-leaning pundits and economists warn that such rhetoric will prolong the economic slump. Read more
