The Jefferson Journal
Commentary
Anyone who thought “manmade climate cataclysm” rhetoric couldn’t possibly exceed Obama era levels should read the complaint filed in the “public nuisance” lawsuit that’s being argued before Federal District Court Judge William Alsup in a California courtroom: Oakland v BP and other oil companies. The allegations read at times like...
What do parking lots, lotteries, roads, airports, horse race tracks, parks, recycling, golf courses, mapping, food service, pest control, and zoos have in common? All across America, these are activities formerly operated by government that are now being run as businesses through privatization, contracting out, or public-private partnerships. Cities as...
C.E. Larson is a professor of mathematics and applied mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University, and he’s a big believer in the scientific method as a way of thinking and accumulating knowledge. He’s also worried that a proposed new General Education curriculum winding its way through the VCU bureaucracy is so...
When your car has a flat tire, a dead battery, and needs an oil change, you have two choices. Take care of these tiresome but routine tasks, or buy a new car. Few of us can afford the latter option, and even if we did, new cars need maintenance, too....
“A Higher Gas Tax Won’t Fix America’s Highways.” That headline on a March 2nd Bloomberg news story is correct, since per-gallon fuel taxes are increasingly unsustainable, due to ongoing changes in vehicle propulsion methods. That point was stressed in the 2018 Economic Report of the President, released late last month...
A growing problem for modern industrialized Western societies is the legion of government agencies and unelected bureaucrats and allied nongovernmental organizations that seem impervious to transparency, accountability or reform. Their expansive power often controls public perceptions and public policies. Prominent among them are those involved in climate change research and...
The current budget stalemate over Medicaid expansion is similar to what the state faced in former Governor Terry McAuliffe’s first year in office. But the issue deserves a full and vibrant debate in the General Assembly, because expanding Medicaid is a risky business for the long-term financial health of the...
The current budget stalemate over Medicaid expansion is similar to what the state faced in former Governor Terry McAuliffe’s first year in office.In 2014, in a reversal of players, the State Senate wanted to expand Medicaid through the budget and the House argued that a major policy change such as...
Early this month an obscure Virginia-based company, REAN Cloud, announced a nearly $1 billion deal to provide cloud computing services for the Defense Department, reports the NextGov website. REAN doesn’t build the data centers — it helps customers migrate to commercial cloud environments. Which cloud environments? Amazon Web Services’s cloud...
Businesses and nations that spend more on research and development grow at a faster pace, according to many studies. More than half of all R&D expenses on average are attributable to labor, according to an analysis of countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Do occupations...