Free Republic

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate; now what's going to happen to us, with both a Senate and a House?" — Will Rogers Most Marylanders are wondering the same thing. This year, the liberal majority in the Senate and House launched a fiscal attack on Gov. Larry Hogan's efforts to balance the budget, reduce the deficit and cut taxes. Their goal: to handcuff Hogan and prevent him from doing the job we elected him to do. Fencing and mandated spending are the manacles Senate President Mike Miller and House Speaker Mike Busch are using. Here's how they work....

For years, Ecorse Public Schools was a poster child for claims of ineffective oversight of school finances by the Michigan Department of Education. Despite laws that require school districts to balance their annual budget, and rules that require offenders to eliminate deficits within two years, Ecorse spent more on operations than it collected in revenue for 10 consecutive years. Only one other school district has managed to stay out of balance for as long (New Haven Community Schools in Macomb County). But by June 2015, the district had eliminated its $661,000 deficit and projected a positive balance — $343,000 —...

Donald Trump will likely become the Republican presidential nominee after a decisive victory in the Indiana primary and the departure of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday night.

Suppose you're a hardcore fiscal conservative. You don't give a hoot about social issues, and you don't follow any of this nonsense about identity politics or insiders and outsiders. All you care about is getting the nation's fiscal house in order. Are you sitting down? I hope you’re sitting down. Because the candidate you should vote for might surprise you. According to a new report from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the most fiscally conservative presidential contender left standing is . . . Hillary Clinton. Seriously....

The Michigan state agency in charge of government programs to attract and subsidize businesses, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, runs a “Pure Michigan” ad campaign with annual spending of $33 million. The program has been criticized as a pure corporate welfare handout to the Michigan travel and leisure industry. The MEDC's response has been to seek to refute the criticism, suggesting that its own budget, rather than an independent evaluation of its programs' effectiveness, is the key consideration of its officials. As described by previous articles in this series, the MEDC has granted several no-bid contracts to a Canadian company...

RIYADH—Saudi Arabia, crimped by low crude prices, approved Monday a long-term blueprint for the kingdom’s economic transformation aimed at reducing its dependence on oil. The multiyear plan, dubbed “Saudi Vision 2030,” was approved by the cabinet, according to Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Salman. The Saudi cabinet, in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, said the government’s economic council would be in charge of overseeing the vision’s implementation. Saudi officials later Monday were to present a broad overview of the country’s most extensive economic shake-up in decades. The steep drop in oil prices has given new urgency to...

Background Previous articles in this series have documented the secrecy surrounding what have been called “budget justification” reports purchased through no-bid contracts by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation from a company called Longwoods International. (See “Pure Michigan Puffery” Parts I and II as well as “Puffery or Proof?”) Longwoods produces very similar products for agencies in at least eight other states, claiming high returns from taxpayer-funded tourism ads. The MEDC is this state’s agency in charge of business subsidy and assistance programs. Last year it got a $33 million appropriation to run its “Pure Michigan” ad campaign. The agency would...

WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — A statewide, month long initiative to put the clamps on a Senate bill is underway. Senate Bill 463 is aimed at redirecting highway money to the state general fund. This weekend, the Kansas Contractors Association is running ads targeting lawmakers to get them to just say no. It’s called Detour Greenlight and it’s pointed to 24 legislators they believe detour, or normally vote against protecting road and bridge funding. It also names some who they say are for strong spending on roads. “To redirect the little bit of sales tax that goes into the pot to...

Gov. Jerry Brown, casting a living wage as a moral imperative while questioning its economic rationale, signed legislation Monday raising California’s mandatory minimum to $15 an hour by 2022, acting within hours of a similar bill signing in New York. The bill’s enactment comes one week after Brown, Democratic lawmakers and labor leaders announced an agreement on the wage increase, averting a brawl on the November ballot. [snip] California political leaders and labor have struck a deal to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour over the next seven years. One excited fast food worker hugged Gov. Jerry Brown...

What the heck is wrong with us? On Wednesday, Washington, D.C.’s entire Metro subway system shut down with almost no notice to perform emergency inspections, just days after a cable fire “crippled” three lines. The nation’s second-busiest rail system has been plagued by safety problems in recent years, including a 2015 incident where smoke from an electrical malfunction killed one person and a deadly 2009 crash on the system’s Red Line that killed nine people. And with a new Metro chief that has been vocal about returning to a culture that puts safety first, many say that Wednesday’s move is...

In an unprecedented move to protect Washington Metro riders’ safety, the entire transit system was closed for a day last week in order to conduct emergency inspections of electric cables. This had to be done, since a rash of fires, fatalities and other breakdowns has raised concerns about the 40-year-old rail system’s continued capacity to deliver safe, reliable service. Currently the Metro Rail fares cover only a portion of its operating expenses. The system is completely dependent on its parent jurisdictions for paying any capital costs. Without state support, the necessary money would not be available. Few events better highlight...

Rep. Pat Somerville (R-New Boston) introduced a bill last week that would prevent local government employees from using overtime and other extra compensation to boost their taxpayer-funded pension benefits. The bill could can lower the costs of those benefits and make them more predictable, but unfortunately it will do little to contain the runaway costs of an underfunded pension system. The problem with public pensions in Michigan is not how generous they are, but how politicians tend to kick the costs of funding them into the future. When public employees work for one year, they earn credit towards a pension...

Fiscal Policy: House Republicans have a budget plan that would balance the budget in 10 years entirely through spending cuts. But it’s not likely to go anywhere because of the $30 billion in extra spending this year.

Rick Joseph, the 2016 Michigan Teacher of the Year from Birmingham Public Schools, wrote a column for Bridge Magazine in which he cited funding as one of the big problems facing Detroit Public Schools. Joseph cited poverty as another factor that has an impact on school performance. The Michigan Department of Education doesn't factor in a student's economic background when evaluating student achievement. School rankings published by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy do adjust for student backgrounds, however, as do similar ones from the Center for Michigan, which publishes Bridge Magazine. The Birmingham teacher also wrote about the important...

An unexpected burst of plain speaking recently swerved the race for the Democratic presidential nomination off the customary narrative. Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and candidate for the party's 2004 nomination, not only admitted but asserted that labor unions are super PACs. While on the campaign trail, Dean — a Hillary Clinton supporter — described unions as super PACs while attempting to counter suggestions that Clinton was beholden to Wall Street, after collecting significant sums for speeches at financial industry events. “Why does Hillary Clinton have to put up with a double standard?” Dean asked....

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama began peddling his national healthcare system. On more than one occasion, he pointed to Canada and the United Kingdom as examples of a workable national healthcare system. When I first heard him point to them, I instantly thought of Rachel, a work acquaintance who lived and worked in the United Kingdom. She was experiencing abdominal pains and having problems eating for months before England’s National Health Service doctors finally diagnosed the problem to be her gall bladder. The doctor said it needed to be removed. However, from the time they wrote the...

Tennessee's rule factory is cranking at full tilt, and Nashville lawmakers want to tell Memphians how to pay for bike lanes, what monuments we can move, and whether or not we can own skunks (seriously). No gas tax for bike lanes A new bill would prohibit spending any gas tax revenues on bike lanes, pedestrian walkways, and "other non-vehicular facilities." Portions of the state gas tax are required to go to cities and counties. Those governments sometimes use the gas tax funds for matching dollars to get federal money for bike and pedestrian projects. The new bill says all of...

Oregon Treasurer and Portland mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler issued a statement last week noting that the state pension fund’s investment returns were 2.1% in 2015. That beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 index and topped the performance of 88% of comparable institutional investment funds. What Wheeler’s statement didn’t mention was that investment returns for the year still fell 5.6 percentage points below the system’s 7.75% assumed rate of return for 2015. That’s terrible news for public employers and taxpayers. It means the pension system’s unfunded liability just increased by another 20% — growing from $18 billion at the end of...

Politician Tell a Reporter She's a B**ch on Camera VIDEO ONLY ON LINK warning language.

The president of the Detroit Public School teachers union made what has now become a clichéd and erroneous claim when she said the state has been cutting money to state education. Ivy Bailey, the interim president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, wrote in a Jan. 15 column that appeared in The Center for Michigan’s Bridge magazine: "State lottery money for education just replaces (but doesn’t add to) state education funding. The state has been cutting school funding for years." ForTheRecord says: State funding for K-12 schools has increased every year under Gov. Rick Snyder. And the state lottery is...