Certainly the tax bill, which is now close to becoming law, is far from perfect. Just as certainly it has some things in it that needed to be done like lowering the industrialized world’s highest corporate tax rate, doubling the standard deduction for individuals, and wiping out many (but not eno More...
Until recently, a center coalition ruled Washington civilly. Trouble is that the coalition agreed mainly on mutual back scratching and became the creature of lobbyists and interest groups. It tried to appear to do something for everyone but we ended up with crumbling infrastructure, feckless fore More...
Democrats and President Trump seem to be in agreement that America needs another trillion-dollar stimulus program to build infrastructure. It’s ironic that this rare agreement is also wrong. It ignores the lessons of the last trillion-dollar stimulus package at the beginning of the Obama administ More...
Twenty years of major construction projects are bottled up in regulatory queues. If the time in queue were shortened to a maximum of two years, we'd have a flood of new construction AND much of the infrastructure we need to be competitive in the globalized years ahead. No subsidies from the defic More...
Any politician who claims federal spending can be brought under control without substantial changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security is at least ignorant and, if not ignorant, lying; but most Republicans campaigned on a platform of reduced budgets and ignored or denied the need to cut t More...
Unlike the Federal government, states can't print money. All states except Vermont are required by their constitutions to have balanced budgets (not counting pension obligations); and Vermont, justifiably proud of its triple A bond-rating, keeps its budget balanced as well (not counting pension o More...
Kristen Carlson of WCAX did a great interviewing me on why we need to finish the stimulus-funded middle mile broadband buildout in Vermont so that we can have the last mile Internet and cellular service which is lacking in rural areas. This is a counterpoint to More...
The Washington, DC area was one of only two US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in which housing prices increased year-over-year according to the latest release of the More...
In 2010, Texas got more than 8% of its electric power from wind, up from 3% in 2007. That is far and away a greater percentage than any other state, and 25% of the total wind capacity in the US. A More...
Existing nukes are among the cheapest sources of electricity we have. They don't emit CO2 or anything else (other than water vapor) into the atmosphere. There is a solvable (see below) problem with nuclear waste.
So should new nuclear plants be built? The decision should be More...
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