Category: Uncategorized
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Another Disrupter…
On the horizon… all-weather solar cells. What will that do to the economics of the electric grid — and will we be prepared for it?
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Killing Bills Quietly
From the Richmond Times-Dispatch: The General Assembly killed 1,221 of the nearly 3,000 bills introduced during the 2016 legislative session. Two-thirds died without a recorded vote in committee, according to an analysis by the Virginia Public Access Project. “The number of bills that do not receive a recorded vote has consistently increased year over year,” said…
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Disrupting Education and Health Care
by James A. Bacon Education and health care are the two most moribund economic sectors in the U.S. economy, plagued by lagging productivity and poor outcomes. Not coincidentally, both sectors are joined at the hip with government. Democrats are determined to preserve the status quo, while Republicans offer no clear market-based alternative. Is there any reason…
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Who Will Fight for Open Government?
by James A. Bacon Normally, when I write about the decline of the newspaper industry in Virginia, I ask, “Who will report the news?” There’s another question almost as pressing that should concern us all: “Who will fight for open government?” In an interview with Style Weekly, Ginger Stanley, the outgoing chief of the Virginia Press…
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Fairfax County bans Christian immigrants
Fairfax, VA – The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (BoS), in a raucous meeting last night, voted 7 – 1 to ban any more Christian immigrants from entering Fairfax County. The board cited a “clear and compelling danger” posed by Christians importing deadly rattlesnakes into the county. The few stunned onlookers who could gather their…
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Cycling Rolls through Chesterfield, but Will it Reach the Finish Line?
By John Szczesny It’s official, maybe: 360 new miles of bike paths and trails in Chesterfield County. Whether the plan endorsed this week by the Board of Supervisors in a 3-2 vote ever gets funded (and built) remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt cycling advocates scored a big victory. Given county staff’s initial…
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The Politics of Big Data
by James A. Bacon Yesterday I blogged about the All-Payer Claims Database, which has the potential to provide unprecedented insight into medical outcomes and charges in Virginia. By consolidating medical claims data for hundreds of millions of health claims, the database will enable employers, insurers and hospitals to conduct analytical studies that were impossible previously. There is…
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McAuliffe Adminstration Gives P3s a Second Chance
by James A. Bacon The McAuliffe administration has spent much of its first two years unwinding the legacy of botched and controversial public private partnerships inked by the McDonnell administration: radically truncating the plan to to build a U.S. connector between Petersburg and Suffolk, and revising significantly the tolling for Norfolk’s Midtown-Downtown tunnel project. Now, after the enactment of…
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The Terry McAuliffe Show
by James A. Bacon Terry McAuliffe doesn’t just fill the room — he fills the banquet hall. He’s loud, he’s animated, he’s funny and he’s prone to superlatives. Economic development success, he proclaims, comes from superior salesmanship and the art of the deal. Indeed, if he doffed a wig of thinning blond, slicked-back hair, you’d be…
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A Tax Structure Finely Tuned for… a 20th Century Economy
A new study by the Tax Foundation and KPMG of state business taxes differs from previous studies, which look at average levels of taxation, by examining how state tax structures affect different types of business. The big conclusion from “Location Matters: The State Tax Costs of Doing Business“: Firms experience dramatically different tax rates because…
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Proudly Training the Next Generation of Indentured Servants
In the latest example of do-gooders creating social injustice, we now hear that nearly 7 million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal loans. As of July, 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t sent a payment to the government in at least 360 days, according to the…
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You Know Things Are Bad When the Turnaround Team Quits
City of Richmond finances are such a mess that Mayor Dwight Jones hired a special turnaround team around the beginning of the year to fix it. Now key members of that team, City Finance Director Paul Jez and Controller Leon Glaster, are bailing. “I just realized that I wasn’t the right fit for the city at this…
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Almost Heaven, Pets Virginia
Source: WalletHub Some WalletHub brain candy for readers while I’m on vacation and the excessive consumption of Margaritas inhibits serious blogging… The city of Richmond ranks 5th best city in the country for pet lovers based on metrics pertaining to the cost and availability of veterinary care, the percentage of pet-friendly hotels, the number of pet meetup…
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the End of the Carnage
Seventy years ago, American aircraft dropped an atom bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, adding another horror to the train of horrors that was World War II. The hand-wringing over the decision to deploy the atom bomb, which resulted in roughly 250,000 deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, continues to this day. I’m not one of the hand-wringers. Seventy…
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A Glimpse into the Byzantine World of Virginia Health Care
by James A. Bacon To call the United States health care system Byzantine is to cast a slur upon the ancient empire of that name. A glimpse of the bizarre, Rube Goldberg-esque way in which the system functions in Virginia can be seen in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch article about the state’s Certificate of Public Need (COPN) program.…