waste

Some recent inspector general reports from within various federal agencies show that the Trump administration is attempting to weed out abuse, fraud, and waste in government programs.

Environmental groups predictably took National Park Week as an opportunity to decry President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut the budget for the Department of the Interior.

Lawmakers in Salt Lake City recently approved giving the city’s NBA team, the Utah Jazz, $22.7 million in tax revenue collected from businesses in the basketball arena’s zoning district. The subsidy will be doled out over the next 25 years. The “reimbursement,” as lawmakers on the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City termed the gift, is expected to be used to help pay for the planned construction and renovation of the Vivint Arena, where the Jazz play ball.

Last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) (i.e. the government) received a court order (i.e. from the government) that would force private computer giant Apple to write a program (a “backdoor”) to break the privacy-protecting encryption of their iPhone.

In today’s episode of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Illinois State Representative Tom Morrison joins Director of Communications Jim Lakely to talk about Heartland’s upcoming Benefit Dinner as well as the issues facing the state of Illinois.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Jesse Hathaway, managing editor of Budget & Tax News speaks with Tom Lampman. Lampman is a fiscal policy fellow at the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy. Hathaway and Lampman talk about a new report about billions of dollars in wasteful spending by the Ohio state government.

They first tried to say the cause of the crash was a lack of government money. Except Amtrak has received over $30 billion since its 1970 inception. The last spending bill signed by President Barack Obama included $1.4 billion for Amtrak.

The obvious successes of past technologies have made politicians and environmentalists eager to be in the forefront of promoting futuristic schemes for their goals. Everyone wants to be on the side of the next Great Idea. All too often these futuristic fantasies are sold to a gullible public, as well as fellow politicians and the news media, with impressive but scientifically-flawed arguments that bump up against harsh physical realities that are immutable.

Wind energy produces costly, intermittent, unpredictable electricity. But Government subsidies and mandates have encouraged a massive gamble on wind investments in Australia – over $7 billion has already been spent and another $30 billion is proposed. This expenditure is justified by the claim that by using wind energy there will be less carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere which will help to prevent dangerous global warming.

Despite its deep effects on the character of our nation, conservatives and the general population often ignore what children are learning except when their own are in school, so I thank everyone reading this debate and my worthy, tenacious opponent, Mike Petrilli, for your time and attention. National Common Core testing and curriculum mandates are destructive, overall, but one good side-effect is creating the opportunity to discuss what children will learn, and why.