The Jefferson Journal
Commentary
(As Congress struggles to avoid the “fiscal cliff” created by years of deficit spending and a huge economic blow to Virginia’s defense-related industries, this column provides an important perspective to this debate. It is important that whatever actions are taken that we all understand the facts). In a commentary entitled...
Unfunded federal mandates are a growing problem for states and an even larger problem for local governments. The Jefferson Institute and the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic at George Mason University prepared a legal “Nutshell” on how to challenge these unfunded mandates. The bottom line of this report is that...
There are a few immutable functions of government—and public safety is paramount amongst them. We expect our state and local governments to use our tax dollars to keep the public peace, to punish those who do wrong, and ensure streets remain safe for prosperous economic development. But as with all...
In the film adaption of Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel, Captain John Yossarian defines the phrase “Catch-22” this way: “In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy any more...
A report recently released by Citizens Against Government Waste gives Virginia a “D” for its large gap between state and private sector compensation. Although that may sound bad, the main point of the study for CAGW by John Dunham & Associates, a New York-based economic research firm, isn’t that some...
Privately owned APM Terminals provides Virginia’s ports something that the state cannot: super-efficient container yards and the ability to expand capacity without incurring $2 billion in debt. It’s easy to get crane envy when you’re in the port business. The bigger and more modern the crane, the faster it can...
(Publisher’s note: Since the “fiscal cliff” is a huge issue facing our nation as well as Virginia, it is important to understand why our country faces this financial crisis. This article helps put the issue into perspective). Politicians, activists, and college professors have made a virtual cottage industry of assigning...
Joseph Heller’s novel had nothing on Virginia’s charter school law. In the Catch-22 of Virginia charter schools, only schools that look like traditional public schools can be approved. In which case, they are not innovative and need not be approved.
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Recent rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have serious implications for business owners across Virginia. The NLRB now permits labor unions to form bargaining units from specialized areas of a company rather than the traditional rule of allowing broader categories of workers to be organized. These ‘micro-unions’ represent...
(This column first ran in the Richmond Times Dispatch on September 9, 2012. It is reprinted here with minor edits.)As a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) uranium mining study panel, I spent more than 18 months as a volunteer preparing a report intended to objectively inform Virginia...