Year: 2012
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Taking Bicycles Seriously
Bike lanes in Arlington County are not a parks & recreation sideshow — they create transportation options, reduce traffic congestion and promote healthy lifestyles.
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Richmond’s Redskins Deal Gets Even Weirder
By Peter Galuszka The deal for the Washington Redskins to build a summer training facility gets richer, more one-sided and more questionable by the day. The latest wrinkle, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch, is that the City of Richmond will use money from its school and jail budgets to pony up a $10 million…
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Virginia Demographic Projections: Read the Fine Print
The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has just released its Virginia population projections for 2020, and there aren’t many surprises. Growth, according to this report, will continue much as it has in past decades, with the fastest growth taking place (a) in the larger metropolitan regions, especially the urban crescent, and (b) in exurban…
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Our Out-Of-Control Military
By Peter Galuszka Are we too in love with our military? Forgive the pun, given the resignation of CIA director and former Army general David Petraeus in a sex scandal. But it still needs to be asked given the decade-long gush of praise for men and women in uniform, many of whom have some Virginia…
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Chart of the Day: Diversity in America
America’s most diverse counties. Source: Atlantic Cities blog. San Jose, according to the calculations of Jed Kolko, is the most racially diverse metropolitan region in the country: 35% white, 31% Asian, 28% Hispanic, 3% multi-racial and 2% black. New York ranks second. The map above displays diversity for counties across the United States, with greater…
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Young Woman in a Hurry
by James A. Bacon Two years ago, Jody Burton purchased a used F-150 pick-up truck for $1,200. The old guy she bought it from seemed to have done a good job of maintaining it, so she figured it would hold up pretty well. Next, she ran a couple of ads in the paper. Bingo, she…
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From Green Paint to Green Painters
by James A. Bacon Moving to the Fan district of Richmond in the 1990s, Michael Johnson decided that his decades-old house needed some work. Like many other gentrifiers, he covered the old paint with a layer of fresh latex. What he didn’t realize is that latex does not adhere well to lead-based pigment. He didn’t…
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Clouding NoVa’s Planning Horizon: A Higher Washington Skyline?
by James A. Bacon One of the most important decisions affecting human settlement patterns in Northern Virginia is under review by the Washington, D.C., city council and Congress — and there is absolutely nothing anyone in Virginia can do about it. I’m not talking about the future of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) or…
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Medicaid, the New Middle-Class Entitlement
by James A. Bacon The Medicaid program was enacted in 1965 to provide a medical safety net for low-income families and for destitute elderly who had exhausted their personal resources. It has morphed into an entitlement to preserve middle-class standards of living. The reasons are understandable. You’d have to have heart of stone not to…
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Is Now the Time for a Carbon Tax?
By Peter Galuszka With the 2012 election decided, there seems to be some movement towards considering establishing a carbon tax to cut greenhouse gases and mitigate climate change. Despite the Kyoto Protocols of 1997, which the U.S. did not sign, and a slew of renewable energy projects in places such as Europe, there has been…
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How Economic Development Should Work
If you want to get a sense of how government can usefully engage itself in promoting Virginia’s manufacturing sector, consider the Commonwealth Center for Advancing Manufacturing (CCAM) in Prince George County near Petersburg. The not-for-profit center has created a venue where corporations collaborate to test the latest high-tech manufacturing equipment — like a new plasma…
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Is Virginia Losing Its Economic Mojo?
by James A. Bacon How competitive are Virginia’s three major metropolitan regions when it comes to job creation? EMSI, an economic modeling firm, has come up with an intriguing methodology to tease out the “regional competitiveness effect” of the nation’s 100 largest MSAs, and the results do not comport with Virginia’s image of itself as…
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The Puppet Masters of Decatur
UVa’s accreditation by the Southern Commission on Colleges comes with lots of strings. by Reed Fawell A few days ago, we asked the question, “Who runs UVa?”, highlighting the little-known Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCC), a regional accrediting organization that presumes to pass judgment on the University of Virginia’s governance practices.…
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Please, Please, Please, Pay Attention to the Situation in Charlottesville!
Dear Governor McDonnell, I know you’re a busy man. You oversee the entire breadth and scope of state government. You don’t have time to get involved in every local controversy. But every once in a while, if you don’t step in to correct a bad decision, you can wind up with a big mess on…
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McDonnell’s Post-Electoral Pouting
By Peter Galuszka It’s only three days after Virginia and the rest of the nation reelected President Barack Obama but already Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is acting like a petulant child. Faced with the certainty of Obamacare, McDonnell appears to be tossing the responsibility of creating exchanges to help self-employed or people denied medical insurance…