Did you know that the full Kentucky Senate planned to meet on short notice – behind closed doors – Wednesday to discuss the Bluegrass State’s public pension crisis? Right. No one else knew, either. Not even the Legislative Research Commission knew — and the LRC is the entity that keeps the calendar for public legislative…
Yet another attempt to raise the minimum high school dropout age in Kentucky to 18 is going to be debated during the current legislative session in Frankfort. This idea stalled at least twice before, but that doesn’t seem to stop some non-data oriented, feel-good folks from wanting to try again. Several years ago when this…
According to recent reports from the Kentucky Legislative Ethics Commission, 2012 was a record year for politics in the commonwealth. That’s because by the time Bluegrass businesses had retired their checkbooks for the year, a grand total of $17.8 million was spent by 630 different groups on lobbying the legislature. That’s up from $15.1 million…
Education Week just published an article about states where the college system is producing too many elementary school teachers for the available jobs (subscription?). Kentucky is an over-producer. Per EdWeek, Kentucky has a demand for 730 new elementary school teachers but the supply from colleges is 1,275. That means 545 Kentucky college graduates won’t have…
If the Kentucky state government wants to operate a secret, non-transparent public pension system, then by all means, it should. The catch is that the state absolutely should not use taxpayer dollars to do it. Currently, the state’s pension system is as transparent as a brick wall. In fact, state law goes as far as…
Is the federal agency ignoring ground water contamination from fracking in Texas? New articles are widely circulating about the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) strange handling of natural gas contamination of drinking water supplies in a suburb West of Fort Worth, Texas. According to Texan Steve Lipsky, his well water started bubbling like champagne after a…
An interesting article about the increasing racial diversity of the US population ran in today’s USA Weekend. The article includes some color-coded maps that show the racial mix in most states and counties has become quite diverse over the past three decades. Most notably, if you look at the large 2010 map, you will see…
It’s happening right now in some Kentucky schools and elsewhere around the country, too. In a few cases, kids throughout an entire school district are getting free or reduced cost lunches even though they wouldn’t qualify under the standard rules. I found out about this because new data the Prichard Committee Blog says they got…
By Jim Waters American revolutionary James Otis gets credit for saying: “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” Whoever said it, those words ring just as true here today in Kentucky as they did in 18th century colonial Massachusetts. Thankfully, State Auditor Adam Edelen also is demonstrating his belief in this founding principle with his initiative to…
If you are looking for a quick introduction to Kentucky’s public pension mess, look no further than this video created by cn|2’s Pure Politics. In just a few short minutes, Ryan Alessi lays out an accurate picture of what exactly is going on. I specifically appreciate his mentioning of the fact that the real victims of…