As cities across the country face growing deficits, instead of their current strategy of raising taxes and cutting services, they might like to take a look at a few case study examples of how those before them solved their challenges.
As an example, ten years ago we hosted the then-mayors of Indianapolis, Stephen Goldsmith, and [...]

A few weeks ago a 16 year old high school girl was gang-raped for a period of over two hours in a poorly-lit courtyard on the campus of her high school during the homecoming dance. While there have been outpourings of horror, sympathy for the victim, funds raised for her future, etc., I’ve seen absolutely [...]

Steel girders crashing down on commuters crossing the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge; drivers killed in Minneapolis as an overwater link on a major interstate highway collapsed underneath them; hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans as levees supposedly designed to protect the city from catastrophic flooding were overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina’s storm surge.
There is an [...]

As an addendum to an earlier post citing the Obamas’ and various politicos’ (including Treasury Secretary Geithner and Tom Daschle) problems either understanding or adhering to the nation’s tax law, former Socialist Congressman Ron Dellums has apparently also decided that taxes are for the “little people.” He and his wife Cynthia owe at least $239,000 [...]

When Nancy Pelosi convenes her new House Un-American Activities Committee to call forth ObamaCare protestors (see her “‘Un-American’ Attacks Can’t Derail Health Care Debate“), I hope she’ll find room on the docket for a few other, arguably more egregiously un-American activities—and bring their perpetrators to account:
Torture
In the black-and-white films I loved as a child, the [...]

Ever wonder how the Golden State managed to run itself into the $26 billion budget hole that only recently was papered over, at least for the coming fiscal year, in a beyond-the-last-minute deal between Governor Schwarzenegger and the California legislature?
California’s Department of Transportation (CalTrans) supplies a modest but nevertheless instructive example of governmental incentives [...]

California’s political leaders are in the midst of celebrating their temporary “solving” of the state’s Brobdingnagian budget mess by combining spending cuts and tax increases with heavy doses of accounting legerdemain. Once again, however, Sacramento has failed to take advantage of a golden opportunity to stanch the red ink without imposing [...]

In 1971 Elaine May wrote, directed and starred in the now-classic “A New Leaf.” May played the awkward and painfully shy heiress Henrietta Lowell who has taken refuge in an academic career in botany and left the handling of her household and fortune to her hired help. The hired help, given full check-writing access to [...]

Way back in 2002, as part of the process of closing Oakland’s historic Army Base, 303 acres of Army-owned land were transferred to local government entities—168 acres to the Port Authority and 135 acres to the City of Oakland itself.
Located just south of the Bay Bridge, the two properties have remained in limbo ever [...]

Unprecedented budget deficits at the local, state and federal levels of government should not be cause for despair, but rather taken advantage of to force the public sector to confine itself to its constitutionally delegated powers.
In last Thursday’s (June 18, 2009) Orange County Register, columnist Shawn Steel jumped on a bandwagon I’ve been playing [...]