Author: James A. Bacon
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Your Health Care System on the Government Needle
From the power-corrupts-and-absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely department in today’s Wall Street Journal: An extraneous and last-minute provision inserted in the New Year’s Day fiscal-cliff legislation sharply cut Medicare payments for Elekta AB, a Swedish maker of radiation tools used to battle brain tumors. Turns out that Elekta competitor Varian Medical Systems, of Palo Alto, Calif., had persuaded Senate Majority…
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Chart of the Day: Planning Regulation
Stephen Oliner, a UCLA professor doing research for the Federal Reserve Board, has made the first-ever estimate of planning times for commercial construction across the United States. Drawing upon 82,000 projects nationwide, he found that the average planning time nationally is about 17 months. But it’s a long longer in some places and shorter in…
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The Agenda behind the Attack on UVa’s Accreditation
by Reed Fawell III The Southern Association of Colleges and Universities (SACU) is threatening to revoke the University of Virginia’s accreditation on the grounds that the Board of Visitors improperly removed President Teresa Sullivan last year. Why does this obscure organization propose to dictate governance policy to one of the oldest and most respected universities…
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Socioeconomics, Culture and Public Health
by James A. Bacon The average life expectancy in the affluent West End of Richmond is 83 years. The comparable number for residents of Gilpin Court, a public housing project in the east side of the city, is about 60 years. How do we explain that discrepancy? The conventional wisdom attributes the health gap to…
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Electric Cars and Burning Trucks
In a Dec.5, 2012 news conference, presumed Democratic candidate for governor Terry McAuliffe stated unequivocally that he chose to locate his electric-car manufacturing facility in Mississippi because Virginia economic developers were not interested. “They decided they didn’t want to bid on it,” he said. Nancy Madsen, writing under the Times-Dispatch Politifact banner, thoroughly demolishes that…
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Why Virginia ♥ Panama
by James A. Bacon West Coast ports import 70% of the Asian trade, and half of that cargo moves to the Midwest and East Coast by means of trains. In effect, that means 35% of the Asian trade will be up for grabs by Hampton Roads and competing ports, when the Panama Canal opens up…
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Swapping Smarts for Asphalt
Smart traffic lights are no cure-all for Virginia’s congested road network but VDOT increasingly regards them as part of the solution.
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$240 Million to Save One Minute Travel Time?
by James A. Bacon Spending roughly $240 million to build the Charlottesville Bypass will save motorists less than one minute of travel time compared to driving on U.S. 29, according to a new analysis by the Charlottesville-Albemarle Transportation Coalition (CATCO). The installation of synchronized stoplights in 2007 has cut travel time on the congested stretch…
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One Trophy Virginia Doesn’t Need: King of the Incentive Packages
Kudos to the McDonnell administration: Virginia was not one of the big spenders on economic incentives in December 2012. A report on economic incentives published by the Site Selection Group covered 224 global projects exceeding a total of $2.4 billion. A list of the 83 largest in the United States included only one — $1.3…
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McDonnell Unveils Transportation Goodie List
To make the benefits of his transportation tax package more politically palatable, Governor Bob McDonnell has announced a list of 15 major road and rail projects that would receive funding — from the Rail-to-Dulles Metrorail project to a bridge replacement for Interstate 81 over the New River. The funding proposal, which would scrap the gasoline…
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Who You Gonna Believe?
Is the population of Arlington County growing or shrinking? The latest 30-year projection by the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service in Charlottesville forecasts that the county will decline by nearly 10,000 to under the 200,000 mark by 2040. But Arlington planners, looking out their windows at the 1,380 new housing units under construction, project…
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Infographic of the Day: Hampton Roads Flooding
If you need proof that flooding is getting worse in Hampton Roads, here it is. This graph shows the number of hours that the posh Hague neighborhood in downtown Norfolk has experienced flooding over the past 80 years. Can anyone see a trend line? The graph comes from a new report, “Recurrent Flooding Study for…
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One More Time… The Beauty of the VMT Tax
by James A. Bacon As the General Assembly weighs the merits of Governor Bob McDonnell’s tax plan, which would force non-drivers to subsidize drivers through the sales tax, it is useful to remind ourselves what the diametrically opposite tax regime, a Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) tax, might look like. Two years ago, transportation economist George…
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The American War that Time Forgot
by James A. Bacon Two hundred years ago, a young America was engaged in one of the most obscure wars in its history, the War of 1812. Most Americans, if they know anything at all about the war, may recall that Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the siege of Fort McHenry…
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The Intellectual Poverty of Richmond’s Poverty Report
by James A. Bacon An anti-poverty commission appointed by Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones has produced a schizophrenic report recommending how to address poverty in the city. On the one hand, it proffers some common-sense proposals on how to help poor Richmonders find jobs and otherwise improve their condition. On the other, it advocates anesthetizing…