News Round-up
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ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT British Energy Minister Announces Halt to Onshore Wind Farms British officials are putting an end to new onshore wind farm construction, halting an energy experiment that produced little usable electricity while draining the finances of British taxpayers and electricity consumers. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama did not agree on much during the presidential campaign. One thing on which they did agree, however, is the need for the United States to produce more of the energy we use. In the latest setback for the renewable-energy sector, the Weld County District Attorney’s Office in Colorado is investigating Abound Solar for possible criminal violations. After Election, McDonnell Declines to Set Up Virginia Health Insurance Exchange Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell says it’s going to be up to the federal government to bring President Obama’s health care law and its insurance exchanges to Virginia, because McDonnell’s not going to do it for them. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has opted not to expand the state’s Medicaid program, despite the mandate to do so under President Obama’s health care law. Since the inception of President Barack Obama’s health care law, I and others in the libertarian community have argued this law represents a massive corporatist project – that under the guise of achieving subsidized universal coverage, major corporations would use the approach to undercut their competitors by raising the costs of small businesses and shift their own costs to the American people. EDUCATION The number of public school administrators and nonteaching staff has grown seven times as fast as student enrollment since 1950, according to a new report published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Taxpayers would have saved $37.2 billion in that time if the teaching force had instead increased one and a half times as fast as student enrollment and nonteaching staff matched enrollment. Chicago and Washington DC officials are attempting to prepare parents and teachers for school closings. Both have lost thousands of students in the past decade, a national trend among urban districts: Chicago is down about 6 percent and DC 35 percent. Teachers believe a great many myths about brain science, such as that learning styles matter and enriching preschool environments boosts learning, according to a study recently published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The more general knowledge a teacher had, the more likely she was to believe false, popular myths about how brains work. BUDGETS AND TAXES What Went Wrong With the Bush Tax Cuts Critics of the Bush tax cuts often dismiss the tax changes as a failed experiment in free-market economics. Noting that economic growth was slower in the years following the cuts than in the years preceding them, some critics see the experience as evidence that tax cuts simply do not work. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and other Republican leaders in Congress have offered to overhaul the federal tax code to take another $800 billion in taxes over the next 10 years, but some Republican legislators are already saying no to the deal. FINANCE, INSURANCE, REAL ESTATE Uberbillionaire Warren Buffett recently declared tax rates don’t matter to investors, but the actions of publicly owned companies and investors as the nation nears the “fiscal cliff” say otherwise. TECH An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Mike Enzi (R- WY) have introduced during the lame duck session of Congress would add their Marketplace Fairness Act proposal to the bill. If passed with the amendment, the bill would allow states to collect sales tax on Internet purchases, even if an online retailer has no physical presence in the state. LEGAL AFFAIRS A West Virginia lawyer who beat up his client with a baseball bat, and even continued to beat the client as he lay on the ground, has been disbarred for ethical violations. |
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