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…
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…
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…
$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 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…
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…
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…
Once again, we have a special legislative session. And once again, newspapers trot out that special session legislative days cost tens of thousands of dollars. So what? As I’ve noted before, regular legislative session days are close to 18 times more expensive than special session days. In that post, I offered to correct my calculation…
Did you know the special legislative session recently called by Gov. Beshear is costing Kentuckians $60,000 per day? This is especially galling considering one of the issues on the agenda during this bonus session is establishing a workable budget for Kentucky’s Transportation Cabinet. Hmm…how could we possibly find the funds to keep the maintenance of…
Should the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government subsidize golf? That is the question council member Jay McChord is asking. Kentucky.com is reporting that at a recent city council work session, McChord was asking difficult questions about whether it is not only feasible for the city to fund public courses at the tune of $3.2 million each…