The Jefferson Journal
Commentary
While it would have been a popular step with his political base, and one he was expected to take, Governor Ralph Northam may have been smart to pass on seeking to veto state budget language preventing Virginia membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Nothing in the budget language prevents...
In the last issue, I wrote about a new study published in Nature Sustainability, and the blog was entitled “Growing Corn Kills People”. After some difficulty I was able to obtain a copy of the maize study listed above, which I did not have on April 11. The conclusion that growing corn (maize)...
My Reason colleagues and I have long argued that per-gallon fuel taxes should be replaced by mileage-based user fees (MBUFs). I served on the Transportation Research Board committee that alerted the transportation community to the looming decline of fuel tax revenues, in 2006. My colleague Adrian Moore served on the...
With the U.S. unemployment rate at a nearly 50-year low of 3.6 percent in April, this year’s graduates should have an easier time finding jobs than their predecessors. And even better news is that wages for employees at private nonfarm companies have started rising — they were up 3.2 percent...
If the public policy debate over affordable dwellings is as impoverished as that described in The Virginia Mercury recently, poor Virginians are doomed to lives of housing misery. Here’s how reporter Ned Oliver sums up the controversy: “Is affordable housing something for the state to tackle, or should it be left to...
The building season is here, but for developers of Virginia’s two hotly-contested natural gas pipelines, activity is back in the government agencies and courthouses. The construction sites remain largely silent, delays running up the ultimate cost of the projects, including the cost of failure. Here is my (probably flawed) attempt...
Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and a team of other scientists issued a study on April 1, 2019, which initially I thought was an April Fool’s joke. It is no joke!According to one publication and its author, Prachi Patel, wrote on April 4, 2019 “…corn is...
Talk of recession has picked up again. The reason might sound complicated, but the principle is fairly basic. In financial parlance, we’re talking about the inversion of the yield curve. Here’s what that means … and how it might take a bit of time to know the consequences.The U.S. Treasury...
Government is much better at creating poverty than at curing it. On April 3 the General Assembly voted to end the practice of suspending driving licenses for non-payment of fines or restitution or both and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles to restore driving privileges for hundreds of thousands of Virginians....
Last year, the Richmond City Council considered an 80 cent per pack increase in the cigarette tax. After several public hearings and careful consideration of the shortcomings of this proposal, the City Council voted it down. But like Jason in the series of Halloween movies, “he’s back!” This time the...