States should flatly reject ObamaCare exchanges
Cato’s Michael F. Cannon provides the reasons why: Video produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg. Tweet it if you like it!
Planning for Kentucky’s Future
The 2004 publication “Planning for Kentucky’s Future” is now available on FreedomKentucky.org here. This publication asks: What the role of Kentucky’s government should be? What the vision for the state should be ? What are the essential services government must provide? How do we know our government is doing a good job? How much should…
Quote of the day: Robbing Peter to pay Paul
“We as a commonwealth cannot continue paying off the Visa with the Master Card.” –State Sen. Joe Bowen, R-Owensboro
Over-regulation hurts mid to lower-income workers, says the Institute for Justice
This week our very own Jim Waters, President of the Bluegrass Institute, hosted “The Afternoon Show” on Lexington’s WLAP. During the broadcast, Waters had the opportunity to interview Dick Carpenter, co-author of the Institute for Justice’s recently released report entitled “License to Work” – a study that compares occupational licensing burdens across the states. Kentucky’s occupational…
Care to guess what the retirement system’s debt is?
Below is a frightening quote from the upcoming release Future Shock: Kentucky’s Politicians’ Opulent Pensions Have Become A Modern-Day Gold Rush. According to the Legislative Research Commission, the state’s current debt from borrowing is $9.6 billion – an impressive amount, but no so much compared to the retirement systems’ debt, which is 34.5 billion. As…
Kentuckians’ standard of living in jeopardy
This is a quote from the upcoming report Future Shock: Kentucky Politicians’ Opulent Pensions Have Become a Modern-Day Gold Rush. …the main message of this story resides in the subsurface — the attitude of the General Assembly…demonstrated by flat-out greed and disrespect for the public treasury, which now has put the standard of living of…
Tuition increases and prevailing wages
$16,518. That is how much it will cost an in-state undergraduate student to attend the University of Kentucky for a single year after this most recent 6 percent increase in tuition approved by the school’s Board of Trustees. This is not a new trend. In fact, according to a recent Lexington Herald-Leader article by Linda…
The public safety, golf debate continues
The Lexington Herald-Leader published a letter a couple days ago by Andy Hightower of the Kentucky Club for Growth. Hightower was questioning the wasteful spending of having publicly subsidized golf courses that are not able to recover their own operating costs while city fire stations suffer brownouts and put citizens at risk. He was right…
No pension transparency. Surprised?
Interested in how much taxpayer money is being shelled out to retired legislators, judges and state workers in the form of public pensions? Too bad. You can’t find out. Regardless of the fact that public pensions are largely funded by Kentuckian’s tax dollars, Kentuckians remain in the dark about which public servants are receiving once…
How important is golf? What about fire protection?
I wrote yesterday about the city of Lexington subsidizing golf courses, a practice which, fortunately, has been questioned by some on the city council. Given the budget crunch Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government is experiencing, it seems that the $1 million annual loss from operating these courses could be put to use for more important things…say…