California’s wildfires continue to burn out of control, with the Mendocino Complex Fire near Clear Lake in Northern California, at 283,800 acres, now considered the largest fire in modern California history. As of sunset Monday, it was only 30 percent contained and had burned 75 homes. More than 14,000 firefighters, including some from as far...
In April 2016, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15-an-hour minimum wage law into effect. As a consequence, the minimum wage went from $10 an hour to $10.50 an hour for businesses with 26 or more employees on January 1, 2017. On January 1 of this year, the minimum wage was hiked again to...
California is once again on fire. Northern California’s Carr Fire has killed six people, two of them firefighters, and continues to burn out of control, claiming more than 700 homes and about 100,000 acres. As a citizen-soldier in the California Army National Guard for two decades, I often heard the gallows humor quip that California’s...
In 2014, the city council in Mountain View, California, a city of 81,000 in the heart of Silicon Valley that hosts Google, Mozilla, Intuit, and other high-tech firms, approved a 400,000 square foot project to house thousands of Facebook employees and other tenants. In the runup to that approval, local restaurateurs complained to the city...
Last week, New York and three other Northeastern states filed a federal lawsuit claiming that 2017’s tax reform and reduction law discriminates against states run by Democrats. They are unhappy that the tax law, signed by President Trump in December 2017 after receiving no Democrat votes in Congress, limits state and local tax (SALT) deductions...
First they came for the New York muck, and I did not speak out—because I am not from New York. Then they came for competitive foot races in wilderness areas, and I did not speak out—because I am not a runner. Then they came for my plastic straws—and there was no one left to speak for me. These...
Government efficiency is an elusive ideal. When a business or a household consistently spends more than it earns, it will go bankrupt. This provides an incentive to review costs. Total government spending in the U.S. will come to about $7.1 trillion this year, of which a little more than half will be federal spending with...
New York, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey – four of the highest-taxing states in the nation – filed a breathtakingly foolish lawsuit this week against the federal government alleging that the tax cut and reform legislation signed into law by President Trump last year is unconstitutional because it unfairly targets Democratic-controlled states. The states claim that the...
During his trip to Europe, President Trump criticized Germany, Europe’s most populous democracy and pivotal NATO ally as being “totally controlled by Russia.” And, if that wasn’t clear enough, he reiterated this by saying, “Germany, as far I’m concerned, is captive to Russia … So we’re supposed to protect Germany, but they’re getting their energy...
This Fourth of July, many Americans are spun up, protesting against President Trump with a long list of grievances – most recently his plans to appoint a conservative justice to the Supreme Court, as well as his immigration policies, his foreign policy, his trade policy, his tweeting … his everything. Calls for the president’s impeachment...
A recent United Nations report blasting President Trump and America in general for harboring “contempt” and “hatred for the poor” is based on highly inaccurate data that can’t easily be used to compare the U.S. to other nations. The U.N. report’s main contentions read like an attack on the Trump administration by the Democratic Party: America has...
Too bad legislators can’t simply pass a law saying, “Stop it!” To grow is a natural law of government. Legal barriers to government growth are circumvented. Instead of complying with statutes designed to protect taxpayers from poor financial decisions, local government officials often seek workarounds. Often, the fuel for enlarging government comes in the form...