The Martinsville area, a manufacturinging powerhouse as recently as the 1980s, has become the poster child for Virginia’s rust belt. Unemployment hit 20% during the bottom of the last recession, and still lingers at 6.8%. Ironically, the Martinsville-Henry County area simultaneously suffers from a labor shortage — a shortage of...
Virginia needs to improve its accountability system for K–12 education. A relic of the No Child Left Behind era, it has a critical flaw: It encourages schools to narrowly focus on the progress of their lowest-performing students. That’s a worthy and important objective, but it shouldn’t be the only outcome...
With the election over and Republicans keeping control of Congress while also securing the White House, our nation has an opportunity to finally fix our broken immigration system, secure our borders, and deal with those living in the United States illegally. To date, both sides have refused to budge on...
(This is part IX of this series on energy. We hope it helps the reader better understand the issues facing our country and our state as we endeavor to tackle the problem of providing our citizens and our businesses with their energy needs.)Hydropower* Hydropower is generated by harnessing the energy...
Do increased cigarette taxes at the municipal level increase revenues to localities? And what is the longer term effect of such increases? A new study from the Thomas Jefferson Institute has some surprising answers.
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There are a lot of issues that aren’t Virginia specific but which impact everyone of us and the dynamics of public policy on these issues is reflected in our everyday lives. One of those issues is the price and availability of sugar. Sugar is in so much of what we...
This chart, published by Hamilton Lombard on the StatChat blog, shows how the working-age population of the United States has begun shrinking in much of the United States. While metropolitan areas still experience a growing workforce as they suck up labor from rural counties, even urban growth is slower than...
Conventional wisdom in the U.S. transportation infrastructure community is that our infrastructure is “crumbling,” and that China shows the way forward by “spending more on infrastructure each year than North America and Western Europe combined.” This has also been a theme of economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman...
After last week’s blog, a helpful reader told me environmental groups already have filed the proper paperwork with EPA to file another lawsuit forcing it to review the possibility of regulating ammonia as a criteria pollutant under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Common sense suggested that after two legal defeats,...
(This is part VIII of this series on energy. We hope it helps the reader better understand the issues facing our country and our state as we endeavor to tackle the problem of providing our citizens and our businesses with their energy needs.) Biomass The term “biomass” refers to non-fossil...
