The Jefferson Journal
Commentary
(Gary Basie lives in Fairfax and is a nationally recognized environmental attorney. His articles show the impact of government regulation on our important agricultural community. What he writes about impacts our farmer here in Virginia.) On November 14, 2011, EPA sent an order to a West Virginia poultry operator claiming...
Two new studies are predicting accelerated sea-level rises on the East and West coasts of the United States, primarily due to global warming. Major media outlets—and in some ways the studies themselves—have painted a distorted picture of past, current, and future sea levels. In fact, the studies actually conflict with...
Today, an estimated 250,000 K-12 students in 30 states receive full-time education online, an increase of 25 percent. With online education continuing to grow, what does it take for teachers to teach when they can’t "see" their students? What kind of training do teachers need? What does the virtual school...
Our high-tax neighbor Maryland is hemorrhaging residents as it struggles to maintain funding for its big-spending government. As Change Maryland’s chairman Larry Hogan noted recently in Reason magazine, the state experienced a net out-migration of 31,000 residents between 2007 and 2010—and 11,500 of them now live in lower-tax Virginia. In...
“I would say that the San Jose vote is a harbinger of things to come” reminded Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Referencing San Jose’s overwhelming vote -70 percent, to cut pension benefits promised to San Jose city workers, she concluded governments generally...
This column originally ran in the Washington Times.) Nearly one billion people worldwide now use Facebook, less than ten years after its founding. But what if, before Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, he had been forced to obtain a government permission slip by proving to bureaucrats that there was a “need”...
(Authors’ Note: While the Jefferson Institute Journal published Mr. Gabriel Roth’s essay, “A Better Way to Improve Transit to Dulles,” before the Loudoun County, Virginia Board of Supervisors approved the county’s participation in the Washington Metrorail Silver Line by a 5-4 vote, it is instructive to offer this rebuttal in...
First of all, they’re monopolies, which are not known for their dedication to cost control or public service. Second, they’re government-owned monopolies, which means that critical decisions on routes and fares are driven by politics, not economics. That’s inefficiency squared. Not only do transit monopolies represent a drain on taxpayers...
Although Virginia is faring better than the rest of the nation, a robust economic recovery in the Commonwealth continues to be dampened, according to the 2012-2013 Virginia Economic Forecast, the thirteenth annual report on the economy conducted by Chmura Economics & Analytics and released by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for...
The Thomas Jefferson Institute today released a paper by two experts presenting an altenative view of Loudoun County’s possible participation in Rail to Dulles, so that members of the Loudoun Board of Supervisors might have all the information they can in front of them as they make this important decision....