Category: Business and Economy
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Do Summer Camps Warrant Bail-out Funds?
by James A. Bacon A philosophical question to ponder: If the Commonwealth of Virginia shuts down an entire industry by executive order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, what moral obligation does it have to help the businesses survive the epidemic? Literally no industry in Virginia has been more impacted by the emergency…
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Saylor Invests a Quarter Billion in “Digital Gold”
It’s one thing for some geeks in a garage to spin up a new Bitcoin currency. It’s another when a sophisticated data-analytics company with nearly a half billion dollars in revenues dives in the cyber-currency. MicroStrategy Inc., one of Northern Virginia’s more prominent IT firms, has invested $250 million from its cash stockpile to purchase…
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BE HEARD Act Could Cripple Virginia Small Businesses
by Hans Bader Small businesses in Virginia could face a very different business climate next year due to Joe Biden’s support for laws like the BE HEARD Act. It could easily become law if Democrats take control of Congress and the presidency (as most pollsters expect). Under the BE HEARD Act, even the tiniest employers…
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Atlantic Coast Pipeline Necessity and the FERC
by James C. Sherlock Peter Galuszka’s piece earlier today in this space made two claims the greens offer endlessly trying to achieve what I call truth by repeated assertion: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) either did not review or did not review properly (he inferred both) the wisdom and necessity for natural gas pipeline…
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What Needs To Be Done After the ACP
By Peter Galuszka For six long years, Dominion Energy and its partners in the $8 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline have waged war against Virginians as they have pushed their way forward with the 600-mile-long natural gas project. Their strong-armed methods have created untold misery and expense for land-owners, members of lower income minority communities, nature…
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How Fed Policy Is Wrecking the Economy
by James A. Bacon Of all known government interventions in the U.S. economy, the most insidious and dangerous is regulation of the price of money (interest rates). Years of Federal Reserve Bank monetary stimulus and quantitative easing, promulgated for the purpose of easing or avoiding a recession, is wrecking the U.S. economy in ways that…
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School Teachers Get Virus? Too Damned Bad!
By Peter Galuszka Here at Bacons Rebellion, a favorite blood sport of late has been tearing apart school teachers by ripping up their “values,” their personal courage, their honesty, their intellects and their mindless lapdog following of their commissars at teachers’ unions The same is true for college professors and administrators (Golly Darn, Reed Fawell…
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Bacon Bits: Pigskins, COVID, Unemployment
Hail the to Pigskins. The football team formerly known as the Washington Redskins has punted on adopting a new permanent name this season, and will refer to itself for the time being as the Washington Football Team. The pause allows the team to “undertake an in-depth branding process” that incorporates player, alumni, fan, community and…
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Common Sense and Coronavirus in Virginia
by DJ Rippert Stepping back. Over the past five months there has been an unending flood of information, guesses, misinformation and politicized ramblings about COVID-19. Various factions put forth their experts and cherry picked data to support their agendas. It’s time to step back and synthesize all that has been written into a set of…
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VEC: 1.5 Million Unemployment Claims In 2020
By Steve Haner By the end of this amazing year, almost 1.5 million Virginians may have filed claims for unemployment insurance payments, leaving the state’s once-record unemployment trust fund balance of $1.5 billion reduced to $750 million in the red, legislators were told this morning. That $2.25 billion swing is due to $2.6 billion spent…
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How Employers Must Prevent COVID, Or Else
By Steve Haner The first thing every employer in Virginia needs to understand about the state’s new COVID-19 temporary workplace standard (here) is it is universal. It applies to every workplace, public and private, for-profit and non-profit, with 10,000 workers or two. The rules are the same, “one size fits all,” without regard to the…
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The Return of the “Cooch”
By Peter Galuszka Early this past Wednesday morning, Mark Pettibone and Connor O’Shead were walking on their way home after a peaceful protest in Portland, Ore. Suddenly an unmarked van pulled in front of them. Men wearing green uniforms, tactical gear and generic signs reading “POLICE” hustled them into the vehicle. They were not told…
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Thank Europe For a Badly Needed Reality Check
By Peter Galuszka It’s time for a pandemic reality check, especially at Bacon’s Rebellion. The blog is flooded with post after post about how the coronavirus crisis is exaggerated and how Gov. Ralph Northam “King Ralph” is Public Enemy No. 1 and wields improper power by closing schools, bars, beaches, businesses and so on. I…
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What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been
By Peter Galuszka Back in the winter of 2015, Craig Vanderhoef, a former Navy captain, got a disturbing surprise in his mailbox at his retirement home near Afton in Nelson County. A letter from Dominion Resources noted that it wanted to survey his land for a new 600-mile-long natural gas pipeline. On two occasions, he…
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Our Cell Phones Are Still Off-Limits to Robocalls
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Here is a follow-up on a previous post. The Supreme Court handed down a decision today that will probably be lost in the coverage of its other decision released today, the one about “faithless” Presidential electors. Nevertheless, the decision in that other case, Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, inc., saves…