Learning Fiscal Discipline: Colorado’s Success, Shortcomings, and Regulatory Ruse

Excerpt:

At its core, TABOR codifies limits on both taxation and spending. It has been so successful that, for the fourth straight year, the State of Colorado announced that they would be refunding taxpayers, this time to the tune of $1.7 billion.

TABOR is not, however, a panacea to government overreach. While TABOR limits how much Colorado taxes and spends, it does not limit the state regulatory code, which has grown uninhibited. Defenders of a free society must take a multi-pronged approach to limiting government.

by David Hebert and Thomas Savidge, The Daily Economy, December 17, 2024.

DRH comment: I’ve talked to an economist friend in Colorado who tells me of some of the problems with TABOR, even as a way of limiting taxes and spending. But it’s much better than what we have in California at the state level.

 

How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

by Roger Pielke, Jr., The Honest Broker, December 16, 2024.

Excerpts:

The resolution — reproduced above — also demanded that, “faculty, students, staff, and administrators [unite] into a powerful cohort that advocates for and takes significant action toward reducing GHG emissions – across the campus, community, state, and nation.”

The entire campus was to engage in political advocacy,

“[We are] urging policy makers, including the regents, system administrators, and campus leadership, to implement swift and systemic changes in order to avoid the worst impacts of extreme weather events, the devastation of human habitats, the collapse of ecosystems, and the loss of biodiversity.”

This reads more like a mission statement for Greenpeace than it does anything remotely related to the mission of a flagship state university.

And:

In 2022, in response to faculty demands, the university hosted a climate advocacy conference – the Right Here, Right Now Climate Summit. This “summit” emphasized celebrities (below), activists, and plenty of exhortations to political action. There was no obvious connection to the university’s actual mission.

And:

A decision was made that all eight graduate courses that I had developed and taught as part of the graduate certificate program were no longer to be offered — This meant that all of the classes I had been recruited to Colorado to develop and teach were no longer being offered.8

I requested of the ENVS chair that I take complete responsibility for leading the continuation of the science policy center (I even found an external partner) and that I would again oversee the S&T graduate certificate program — but he told me no, absolutely not, he would not allow me to do that.

 

First ask what it means

by David Friedman, David Friedman’s Substack, December 13, 2024.

It [a living wage] sounds as though it means something — a wage sufficient to live on. That ought to mean a wage below which you would die but that is not how the term is usually used.

Someone reasonably ingenious and energetic living in a warm climate might be able to keep himself alive with no income at all, given the existence of food banks, dinners for the poor, and other sources of free food; some homeless people probably do. Even for someone without those advantages, enough income to stay alive is much less than people who use the term imagine. The estimate of economic historians is that the average real income of the world was about one twentieth of the current US average through most of history, which means that a sizable fraction of all the people who ever lived did it on the equivalent of less than two thousand dollars a year. Of course, even if someone on that income could stay alive in the modern US, his life would probably be shorter than the lives most modern Americans live.

As were the lives of most people in the past.

If we are looking for an objective definition and abandon the idea of taking the term literally as enough income not to die of hunger or exposure, it is tempting to interpret it as enough so that your life expectancy is not reduced by your low income. That, however, is more than the US average income, since there are multiple ways in which additional income could increase life expectancy, even if only slightly, beyond the income most of us live on. A chauffeur expert in safe driving and the safest car money could buy. A week every year in an elite medical facility being tested for everything that could possibly go wrong.

What people actually mean by a living wage, as best I can tell, is a wage at which they can imagine themselves living a tolerable life. That varies a lot depending both on one’s standard of tolerable and how wide a range of alternatives one considers, whether it includes lentils instead of meat, sharing a single room with four roommates, buying only used clothing.

DRH comment: When I was strapped for funds in my late teens and early 20s, I sometimes bought clothing at Goodwill. I no longer need to. But a few years ago, I couldn’t find a heavy jacket to wear in 40-degree-plus weather, even though I was willing to pay up to $200. So I went to Goodwill and found one I liked–for $8.

 

How Many Americans Really Want Mass Deportation?

by Fiona Hartigan, Reason, December 17, 2024.

Excerpt:

But a new survey suggests that Americans’ support for mass deportation comes with important—and overlooked—caveats. Sixty percent of Republicans believe that “immigration enforcement should prioritize violent criminals and those with final orders of removal rather than ‘all individuals without legal status,'” per a survey from the Bullfinch Group and the National Immigration Forum. Three-quarters of Republicans agreed that “family unity, respect for human dignity, and protection for the persecuted” must be “key priorities” as the government ramps up border security and immigration enforcement.

Overall, “significant majorities of groups” that voted for Trump “want his administration to focus immigration enforcement on threats to public safety rather than cast an unlimited net,” the National Immigration Forum observed. The survey was conducted earlier this month among 1,200 adults, including 1,000 registered voters, and found similarly high support for that idea among Democrats, independents, liberals, and moderates.

 

Hidden Scars: How COVID Lockdowns Altered Teen Brains Forever

by James Goodman, SciTechDaily, December 19, 2024.

Excerpt:

A recent study reported the somewhat alarming findings that the social disruptions of COVID-19 lockdowns caused significant changes in teenagers’ brains.

Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle used MRI scans to examine the adolescent brain’s cortex — the folded outer layer responsible for complex thinking. They discovered that the typical age-related thinning of the cortex accelerated after the lockdowns, with girls showing more pronounced changes than boys.

 

Woman’s right leg amputated after waiting 8 days for bed at Winnipeg’s HSC to treat open wound

by Ian Froese, CBC News, December 16, 2024.

Excerpt:

A Manitoba woman had her right leg amputated after complications following a knee replacement surgery two months earlier.

Roseanne Milburn, 61, went ahead with the scheduled amputation last Friday, after weeks of complications stemming from a post-surgery infection.

In late November, a surgeon at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre began removing dead tissue from her right knee, with the intention of stitching her up later that day after she was seen by an orthopedic surgeon at Concordia Hospital.

She was sent to Concordia, but couldn’t be transferred back to HSC because there wasn’t a bed available for the specialist to finish the procedure. Instead, she spent eight days languishing at Concordia with a painful open wound.

Once she finally got to HSC, Milburn went under the knife for another infection, but due to the long delay in stitching up the wound, she said she was told her leg wasn’t salvageable.