For the last several years President Obama has frequently called for a $50 billion one-time infrastructure program to deal with America’s “crumbling” highways and bridges, a call he repeated in his Feb. 12th State of the Union address. Just a week before, outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood said that...
(This column first ran in the Richmond Times Dispatch on March 4, 2013.) Gross regional product in the Richmond metro area grew 2.9 percent in 2011, according to newly released figures from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. That ranks the region as the 208th fastest growing among 366 metropolitan...
As the White House this week politicized the sequester cuts amounting to $85 billion in lower federal spending, a recent GAO (Government Accountability Office) study identified “more than 1,362 duplicative programs accounting for at least $364.5 billion in federal spending every single year…” claims Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in a...
Average planetary temperatures haven’t budged in 16 years. Hurricanes and strong tornadoes are at or near their lowest ebb in decades. Global sea ice is back to normal, Arctic ice is nearly normal, and the Antarctic icepack continues to grow. The rate of sea level rise remains what it was...
A new Education Improvement Scholarships Tax Credit law allows individual and corporate donors to take a 65 percent state tax credit on their charitable donation to qualified scholarship foundations — on top of the current state and federal tax deduction. Those scholarship foundations, in turn, provide scholarships for the children...
Something unusual happened in the Virginia General Assembly the other week: A bipartisan vote on a controversial issue.Governor Bob McDonnell’s Opportunity Educational Institution legislation crafts a system for taking over consistently failing public schools. McDonnell’s legislation essentially creates a new school division, transferring unaccredited schools from their local school system...
A little-noticed vote in Richmond last week shows the difficulty of keeping government within reasonable bounds when a significant private-sector player, allied with officialdom, seems to prefer the status quo. A bill to make life easier for farmers with small commercial sidelines lost by a wide margin in the Senate...
Though only out of office for a month, it is already clear that one of the most important and potentially lasting legacies of the administration of former Puerto Rico Governor Luis Fortuño will be its work turning the territory into a privatization leader among its state peers. To address Puerto...
Smart traffic lights are no cure-all for Virginia’s congested road network but VDOT increasingly regards them as part of the solution. Northern Virginia traffic was quieter than usual in the early morning of January 17. The weather forecast was calling for snow later in the day, and the Federal Office...
Companies everywhere extol their sustainable development programs and goals. Sustainability drives UN programs like Agenda 21, EU and US green energy initiatives, and myriad manufacturing, agricultural, forestry and other efforts. But what is sustainability? What is – or isn’t – sustainable? Obama presidential science advisor John Holdren has said we...
