History

Jefferson Forum
April 15, 2015

Slow wage growth is one of the side effects of a weak labor market. Even though the official unemployment rate has fallen to 5.5 percent in the nation in February, the rate that includes people working part time who would rather work full time and the marginally attached is 11.0...

Jefferson Forum
April 15, 2015

Edward D. Miller, former CEO of research powerhouse Johns Hopkins Medicine, will resign from the University of Virginia Board of Visitors effective June 30 — a year early. In an interview with the Daily Progress, he cited his frustration with rising tuition and falling research grants. “I just felt there...

Jefferson Forum
April 15, 2015

New data from the U.S. Treasury shows that the federal government has amassed $74 trillion in debts, liabilities and unfunded Social Security/Medicare obligations. This amounts to $603,000 for every household in the U.S., a fiscal burden that exceeds 90% of all the private wealth accumulated in the history of America....

Jefferson Forum
April 14, 2015

There are more efficient ways than expanding Medicaid to keep small, rural hospitals open. That’s the conclusion of a new study issued by the Thomas Jefferson Institute, analyzing the reasons the hospital industry supports Medicaid expansion and noting that larger, profitable hospitals would receive most of the additional funding that...

Mike Thompson
April 3, 2015

New EPA regulations expected to be made final this summer will result in a 25 percent increase in electric bills and a loss of 38,000 jobs here in Virginia. At a time when the Commonwealth is clawing its way out of the recession, these costs will have a devastating impact...

Mike Thompson
April 1, 2015

New EPA regulations expected to be made final this summer will result in higher electric bills and a loss of 38,000 jobs here in Virginia. That’s the conclusion of a new study released by the Thomas Jefferson Institute and researched by economists at the Beacon Hill Institute in Boston (See...

Jefferson Forum
April 1, 2015

Virginia and Virginians have a special role in the history of the Internet and a special concern for its flourishing. You can have a “Virginia Internet C@pital” license plate on your car; last year, the Washington Post suggested that Ashburn, VA was “the center of the Internet”, with 70% of the...

Jefferson Forum
April 1, 2015

Donald Devine could not be more wrong with his data or conclusions (Reagan Idea Could Reform Invisible Bureaucracy, Jefferson Policy Journal, March 19, 2015). He points to the growth of government spending, but the relatively constant size of the federal workforce. He should give government employees more credit. In the...

Jefferson Forum
April 1, 2015

Henrico County, my home county, is conducting an inexpensive public policy experiment. If it pans out, the county could improve its competitive posture as a manufacturing location. If it doesn’t, the county hasn’t lost much and can always revert to the previous status quo. County Manager John A. Vithoulkas has...

Jefferson Forum
April 1, 2015

The terms racism, white supremacy, crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism’s campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth’s most impoverished and powerless people...