At least 57 times in 2017, and many more last year, Georgetown’s residents paid EDF, a company owned 84.5% by the government of France, around 6 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced in the middle of the night when demand was low—so low, in fact, that because of tax incentives and government subsidies, the...
A little more than a decade after California voters narrowly approved a ballot proposition to build an 800-mile high-speed rail system for $35 billion, with completion promised for next year, the project has been derailed by gross government incompetence and malfeasance. The remarkable (and very public) beginning of the end for the state-run rail project...
Chuck Devore, former California assemblyman, says the cost of high-speed rail tickets would cost twice as much as an airline ticket. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, under budgetary pressure to provide more government health care for illegal immigrants and more housing for the working poor, just threw the Green New Deal’s nationwide train network under the...
Unlike the federal government, Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from issuing their own money. State power to tax and borrow is thus limited only by economics and commonsense. Some states rely heavily on volatile revenue sources, such as personal income taxes with high marginal rates or excise taxes on oil...
The federal government released its first jobs report of 2019, showing that nonfarm payroll grew by 304,000 in January, far above economists’ consensus estimate of 170,000. The average monthly gain in 2018 was 223,000. Over the past year, average hourly earnings were up 3.2%. After revising its data for past periods, the U.S. Bureau of...
Federal statisticians are beginning to put a wrap on 2018, providing a clearer picture of the positive effects of President Trump’s tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. There are two sets of data that truly stand out: manufacturing job growth and the rate of private sector job growth in the states. Looking at the national jobs...
Political leaders in a college town in central Texas won wide praise from former Vice President Al Gore and the larger Green Movement when they decided to go “100 percent renewable” seven years ago. Now, however, they are on the defensive over electricity costs that have their residents paying more than $1,000 per household in...
The rural areas surrounding Beijing get cold during the winter, with an average low of 15 degrees Fahrenheit in January. To cope with the daily chill, millions of farmers and laborers have burned coal to keep warm. But the coal—especially coal burned in a home furnace—came at the cost of air pollution, not only in...
There are seven states with no tax on any personal income: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. According to a recently updated National Center for Education Statistics projection, the eight states expected to see the highest growth in public and charter school enrollment in the 12 years from 2015 through 2027 are:...
The Los Angeles teachers’ strike is in its third day, with no end in sight and only about a quarter of the L.A. Unified School District’s 600,000 students attending classes, which are being taught by substitute teachers. The strike by the 31,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles, the union that represents not only teachers,...
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released its December jobs report Friday morning, showing nonfarm employment was up by 312,000, stronger than analysts expected. The impressive jobs number, along with the Fed signaling patience on rate hikes, shook the stock market loose from its doldrums, with the Dow posting a 747-point gain. With the December...
The historic passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act a year ago set off a surge of hiring across America. Since then, private employers added some 2.4 million employees through November 2018, according to the employment reportreleased by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics today. Further, the federal state jobs report shows that low-tax...