Daily Archives: December 1, 2011

When the 2011-13 budget passed into law, everything in it became, well, the law.  That includes Sec. 7.29 (a) that adds five days to  the number of instructional days in the school year.  That also includes Sec. 7.25 (a) that says DPI has to close one of the state’s three residential schools.  Both these newContinue Reading

One of Obama’s stock defenses of more government “stimulus” spending is that we’ll get both better education and more jobs if we spend more money to fix up school buildings. As Cato’s Andrew Coulson observes here, however, government officials already spend much more than do private school officials, and yet have facilities that are inContinue Reading

Paul Chesser tackles the topic again today for the National Legal and Policy Center. Corporations would serve their customers, shareholders, and the public interest better if they paid more attention to free market principles rather than attempting to appease wildly divergent Left-wing interest groups. John Locke Foundation economist (and my former colleague) Dr. Roy CordatoContinue Reading

This morning The Hill published a report on the H.R. 3519 legislation filed earlier this week that would exempt the entire Medicare program from sequestration.  The Democrats who filed the legislation claim that this exemption falls under the Budget Control Act. Interestingly, the Budget Control Act makes it clear that reductions in Medicare payments to providers are capped at 2 percent.  ThisContinue Reading

As everyone knows by now, Mitt Romney’s health care reform in Massachusetts includes a government mandate forcing residents to purchase health insurance. His position today, as he freely admits or even brags about, is that he believes that the mandate was and still is right for MA but would be unconstitutional if implemented at theContinue Reading

Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard aims his wit at his fellow scribes in a new report: Lots of cultural writing these days, in books and magazines and newspapers, relies on the so-called Chump Effect. The Effect is defined by its discoverer, me, as the eagerness of laymen and journalists to swallow whole the claimsContinue Reading

One of Adam Smith’s most famous quotations involves the butcher, brewer, and baker acting in their self-interest to provide us our meals. Writing for Human Events, John Hayward revives this notion of pursuing self-interest “rightly understood.” There is no longer the slightest pretense of treating government as a dreadful expense to be shouldered by aContinue Reading

Fred Reed has a delicious little satire on our diversity mania, imagining the effects of the “Look Like America” bill on college classes, symphony orchestras, and other institutions.