Free Republic

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...

The Bank of Japan is stepping up its efforts to kick-start the country's struggling economy by taking interest rates into negative territory. The central bank announced Friday that it will introduce an interest rate of minus 0.1% and will go even lower if needed. In theory, negative rates encourage consumers to save less and spend more. They can also weaken a country's currency, helping exporters. ...

The Dow plunged 540 points on Wednesday after crude oil plummeted another 7% and crashed below $27 a barrel. The S&P 500 slumped 3.5% to its lowest intraday level since October 2014. The Nasdaq is down another 3.5%. It's the latest blow in what's already been the worst start to a year on record for the stock market. The Dow is now down more than 11% in 2016. "Despite improving valuations, global equities continue to get hammered," Bespoke Investment Group wrote in a client note. The firm said the appetite for risk remains "awful." Turmoil in China and the crash...

Iranian military forces seized two U.S. Navy boats Tuesday and are holding them in custody on Iran's Farsi Island in the middle of the Persian Gulf, senior U.S. officials told NBC News. Officials said it's unclear whether the 10 American sailors aboard one of the small riverine boats had strayed into Iranian territorial waters before they were captured. The officials said the Americans were on a training mission around noon ET when their boat experienced mechanical difficulty and drifted into Iranian-claimed waters and were seized by Iranian Coast guard. The crew was described as being safe. Following reports of the...

HOUSE SPEAKER Paul Ryan and other Republican congressional leaders are being pilloried by GOP activists for pushing through a $1.15 trillion spending bill laden with pork and a bewildering array of tax credits (including one for plug-in motorcycles). This junks up an already mind-numbingly complex tax code even more. "This is what we get from a Republican-controlled Congress?" they angrily ask. Alas, with Barack Obama still in the White House, a divided GOP in the House (which gave Democrats bargaining leverage, since their votes were needed for passage) and the specter of a government shutdown if no bill was passed...

Two questions. One: Is he right? Two: Given that he’s been pounded for weeks for missing Senate votes, does it matter?On the first question, the answer is “depends.” You all know that it takes 60 votes to invoke cloture, i.e. prevent a filibuster, and move to a final vote on a bill. That number doesn’t change depending on how many senators show up for the vote. As people who know Senate rules better than I do pointed out to me on Twitter, the rule on cloture says it can only be invoked “by three-fifths of the Senators duly chosen...

Senate Democrats on Friday boasted that they successfully managed to get just about everything they wanted in a massive spending and tax cut bill, despite being the minority party in both the House and Senate. "Months ago, Democrats called on Republicans to work with us to craft a budget agreement. We wanted to get rid of sequestration, we were able to do that," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. [Snip] "The legislation caps off a successful year for Senate Democrats," Reid said.