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But why do public university budgets keep getting the ax? It’s not (at least not primarily) about the selfishness of wealthy taxpayers. The real answer is more inconvenient for the Democratic coalition: Namely, that exploding public pension costs are putting tremendous pressure on state budgets, and higher education is the softest political target for the belt-tightening needed to make up for it. So argue Daniel DiSalvo and Jeffrey Kucik, political science professors at the City University of New York, in a new Manhattan Institute report that they summarize at U.S. News.

…

So long as public sector unions have a powerful grip on state legislatures, and so long as they can extract inviolable pension commitments (and paper over the magnitude of these promises by assuming unrealistic rates of return) discretionary programs without guaranteed funding carveouts will continue to be squeezed. You won’t hear many progressive activists making this case, but the single best avenue for ensuring that public colleges are fully funded is to roll back collective bargaining rights for unionized public employees so that pension obligations can be put on a sustainable path.

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Connecticut’s wasteful spending and regular tax hikes have triggered an exodus from the state, with high-income earners fleeing to sunny, low-tax Florida. Tax revenues are falling, and even Democratic Governor Dan Malloy acknowledges that tax increases are no longer a solution to shrink the state’s runaway deficits. Nonetheless, state legislators plan to impose yet another new tax, and are deciding whether to install electronic tolls on Connecticut’s roads.

…

People vote with their feet, and this onslaught of taxation is causing Connecticut’s wealthiest citizens to run, not walk, from the state. Surveys show that more people are leaving Connecticut than arriving, and retirees make up 21% of this outbound migration.

Dem ol’ Blue State Blues: Catch a falling Dem and watch him pick your pocket, never gonna go away….

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The point is not only to provide another trough for the piggies, but also to accustom the American people to being treated like concentration-camp inmates.

Those worried about whether Trump is going to ‘send them to a camp’ ought to Fly the Friendly Skies and turn that nightmare into a reality; Trump has nothing to do with it.

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In 1982, the Twin Cities had the 35th-worst congestion in the nation. By 2016, it had grown to be the 17th-worst and amount of time the average commuter spent in traffic had quadrupled. If you are stuck in traffic in the Twin Cities, says this new report, don’t blame population growth; blame the Metropolitan Council, the region’s metropolitan planning organization.

The Metropolitan Council’s official attitude is, “We can’t build our way out of congestion, so we will provide alternatives to congestion” in the form of light rail, bike paths, and maybe a few high-occupancy/toll lanes. The council’s 2040 plan has $6.9 billion programmed for transit improvements, $700 million for bike paths, and $700 million for road improvements. That means 8 percent of the funds goes for the 90 percent of the people who drive to work while 83 percent goes for the 6 percent who take transit.

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As the only option for low to moderate income individuals to obtain health insurance in those states, There is a great deal of money to be made from individuals who purchase plans and the federal government in the form of Obamacare subsidy payments.

And government is all about monopoly.

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During the final year of the Obama administration, federal regulations drained more than $1.9 trillion (about $15,000 per family) out of Americans’ wallets, and the number of rules created by the federal government grew to an all-time high.

That’s the real Obama Legacy.

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Washington lawmakers plan to discuss legislation Thursday to privatize Evergreen State College, which dominated headlines recently for hosting an event segregating white and black students, as well as caving to protester demands.

Whaddaya know — looks like everyone in Washington State isn’t a knee-jerk proglodyte. Color me amazed.

Republican State Rep. Matt Manweller is leading the effort to strip Evergreen State of $24 million in state appropriations after protests rocked the Olympia, Washington campus in late May, according to Campus Reform.

Today’s lesson is: Actions have consequences, and stupid actions have unpleasant consequences. Daddy might even take your Xbox away.

“[Evergreen State students and faculty] are trying to re-institute a Jim Crow approach to education that Americans rejected over 50 years ago,” said the Republican state representative to Campus Reform. “We must never go back to a segregated society—whether it be drinking fountains, buses, or school buildings.”

Tell that to the BlackLivesMatter crowd; they don’t appear to believe it.

“The administration bears direct responsibility for this situation,” continued the representative to Campus Reform. “They hired the professors who have elevated the pseudo-science of ‘social justice’ to a religious movement. Now all dissent is crushed by threats of violence or actual violence.”

That flapping sound you hear is chickens coming home to roost. Feel the Bern.

Representatives will introduce the bill to deprive Evergreen State of state funding alongside a letter directed at Washington state’s Human Rights Commission to investigate possible civil rights infractions at Evergreen.

Oh, good luck with that. Really. (While you’re wishing, wish for a pony.)

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A federal aid program President Donald Trump proposed cutting is under investigation for giving out nearly $1 billion in loans to several nearly bankrupt solar companies, according to a Reuters report published Tuesday.

The Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID OIG) is auditing $890 million of loans approved by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a program used to advance loans to overseas business ventures.

This is the sort of proglodyte virtue-signaling at taxpayer expense that the Obama administration specialized in.

USAID OIG initially began its audit in 2016 but kept it under wraps. The probe is centered on OPIC’s decision to fund five Chilean solar farms and a hydroelectric project in 2013 and 2014 – many of the loans are unlikely to be repaid, according to the report.

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The California Senate Appropriations Committee passed a $400 billion universal health care bill Thursday with no plan to pay for it.

The essence of any Democrat agenda. If they think people are leaving the state now, wait until this kicks in.

Oh, people will be moving in, of course — poor people and illegal immigrants. Good luck with that.

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Wastewater treatment plants operate on the same principle that drove Rachel Carson to organize the effort that led to EPA’s creation. In Silent Spring, she documented how DDT and other water insoluble chemicals are biomagnified up the food chain as they concentrate in the body fat of birds and other animals. Wastewater treatment plants remove trace amounts of these pollutants by concentrating them in the animal fats contained in sewage sludges, which collect in settling tanks.

The question was what to do with sewage sludge. It contains, at millions of times higher concentrations, all of the pollutants EPA strictly regulates in air and water. Since Congress passed Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, but no Clean Soil Act, EPA simply deregulated virtually all pollutants in sewage sludge and encouraged municipalities to reduce odors with lime and apply treated sewage sludges to any available land, from farms and forests to school playgrounds.

EPA’s only challenge was to explain how trace amounts of petrochemicals and other industrial wastes it strictly regulates in air and water become harmless when mixed with sewage sludge at far higher concentrations, and tons per acre of it are spread on land where animals graze and children play. The answer EPA’s Office of Water came up with was to fund research projects at land grant universities across the United States to “support the science and substance” of its 503 sludge rule, and “overcome misinformation spread by opponents.”

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Chicago saw approximately 52 people shot during Memorial Day weekend, despite a heavier police presence throughout the city.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago. Otherwise the place would look like Texas.

Oddly enough, they don’t say how many of these victims were black, since (after all) Black Lives Matter.

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Unfortunately, it’s nothing that a normal person would care about.

I, however, am in hog heaven.

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One of my recent articles predicted that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s endangered species designation for the rusty patched bumblebee would lead to its being used to delay or block construction projects and pesticide use on hundreds of millions of acres of US farmland. The abuses have already begun.

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Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office released an analysis of the current version of the House health care bill that was trumpeted by Democrats because it projected that 23 million people would “lose” their health insurance if the law went into effect. However, as Guy Benson points out, this claim is false, since “the large bulk of those who are said to be ‘losing’ coverage do not currently have coverage.” Further, to the extent that some who currently are forced to buy health insurance by Obamacare decide it isn’t worth the cost to them, and choose not to purchase it, that is rightfully their decision.

I guess we have to revise the classic phrase ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics’ to ‘Lies, damned lies, and government information.’

Why should we believe an agency on a topic where its past projections have been wildly off the mark?

Indeed. If you look at the history of the CBO, it has never been right in any of its projections. Not once. Not ever.

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Evergreen State College students have berated a professor and called for his resignation after he objected to an event where white students were asked to leave the campus for a day.

Bret Weinstein, a biology professor at the university, sent out an email criticizing the purpose of this year’s “Day Of Absence” event where, unlike in the past, white students and faculty members were asked to leave campus to give space to people of color.

Traditionally, the annual event is characterized by people of color leaving the campus to show their contribution to the campus, while white students and faculty members are attending anti-racism workshops.

The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. Yet Trump is the New Hitler.

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Yeah, that’s some affordable care, all right.

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‘Cultural appropriation’ is apparently the new racism.

So where is Portland, the Whitest City in America, going to get their hipster Mex food?

Is puzzle.

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Nonprofit organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed for a temporary injunction against Kellogg Community College after the university arrested two members of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) for distributing small Constitutions on campus, according to a press release obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

An administrator told Kellogg students Brandon Withers and Michelle Gregorie that students from rural areas have “grown up to be ultra polite” and “might not feel like they have the choice to ignore” the students.

“That’s who I’m trying to protect,” said the unnamed administrator.

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I like it already.

The ‘U.N. budget’ is just a way to transfer money from rich stupid white people to corrupt greedy non-white people; Just Say No.

The WaBenzi squeeze enough from their own people, they ought not to be allowed to squeeze more from ours.

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Keeping people safe is the first priority of government. Except under Democrats.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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Of course he will. Democrats never met a terrorist they didn’t like, unless he was white.

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Officials expect the unit to handle around 150 clients per year, only 10 percent of the 1,500 detained immigrants that currently have court dates in San Francisco.

So this is just a sop to prove how progressive and caring they are.

“Mass deportation is against our core values as Americans and San Franciscans,” Adachi said.

I see no ‘mass deportation’, even in the fever dreams of the Left Coast. Perhaps this is like Global Warming, something with which to scare college students and other children but which probably won’t happen.

I guess encouraging people to break the law is a ‘core value’ in San Francisco — which actually doesn’t surprise me.

“Due process still means something in this country and we are not going to let the federal government ship off our friends and neighbors without a fight.”

If somebody is in the United States illegally, shipping them off IS ‘due process’.

‘You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.’

I’d really like to see the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ brigades from San Francisco fight the Federal government. That would be amusing. Presumably Jar Jar Binks is their mascot.

“Just several weeks ago in California’s Bay Area, after a raid captured 11 MS-13 members on charges including murder, extortion and drug trafficking, city officials seemed more concerned with reassuring illegal immigrants that the raid was unrelated to immigration than with warning other MS-13 members that they were next,” the DOJ said.

Some ‘friends and neighbors’ you got there, San Francisco.

Read it.

That’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care’ Act. The first target of Leftist corruption, as Orwell pointed out, is the language.

Richard Epstein does the autopsy.

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal foretells a grim financial future for Connecticut, the wealthiest state in the union by per capita income. Its great wealth, however, does not translate into financial stability. For this coming year, the state expects a $400 million shortfall in tax collections that will only compound its looming budget deficit of some $5.1 billion, attributable to the usual suspects: service on existing debt, a lowered credit rating, surging pension obligations, runaway health care expenditures, and a declining population. In both 2011 and 2015, Connecticut Governor Daniel Malloy sought to fill the fiscal gap by engineering two tax increases on the state’s wealthiest citizens, so that today the state’s highest tax bracket is 6.99 percent. Under the state’s tax pyramid, about one-third of the state’s $7-billion budget is paid by the several thousand people earning over $1 million per year.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Determined progressives may claim the path to prosperity remains blue. But sooner or later, the bubble has to burst. Even the well-heeled individuals willing to pay high taxes for superior services will cut back their business activities or flee when fleeced. Massive government wealth transfers cannot succeed if those whose wealth is to be transferred end up leaving the state altogether. Indeed, in some cases, the departure of just one billionaire can lead to a hole in the budget, as with David Tepper’s departure from New Jersey.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for 2018 prevents illegal immigrants from claiming two major tax credits for low and middle income people, according to White House documents released Tuesday morning.

This seems like a no-brainer to me. But of course the Chattering Class will be foaming at the mouth about it.

The reason why we have so many illegal immigrants is because there is no downside for them. If they get in, they have no problem finding work, they have no problem finding housing, and they have no problem sucking on the taxpayers’ tit for all the benefits extended to the useless of this world; and if they get caught, they just get sent back to try again. Time to shut off the spigot.

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The Supreme Court of the United States today decided that U.S. companies may only face patent infringement lawsuits in the jurisdiction in which they are incorporated, which in Apple’s case would be California.

This has been an open sore for decades.

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Oh, yeah, being the guy’s third wife (or is it fourth? I lost track….) is really going to impress the Pope.

On second thought, with this Pope, that’s not impossible.

Forget I even mentioned it.

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Democrats: Party of corruption since before the Civil War.

Yet Another Crazy Black Female Congresscritter. That these creatures continue to get elected is the best argument against democracy I’ve ever seen.

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In a quietly released statement issued late on a Friday afternoon, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, an agency of the state government, announced a proposal to effectively redefine the word “sex” in the state’s discrimination law to also include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” or “SOGI” for short.

This proposal wouldn’t change the law—only the commission’s “guidance” on the matter. But this new “guidance” would mean the law would be enforced as if it had changed.

This guidance comes on the heels of repeated failures to accomplish the same outcome through the legitimate way of changing laws—through the legislative process and with the consent of the governed.

Proglodytes really aren’t all that into the whole democracy thing. After all, they know better than the rubes in flyover country.

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So what’s the catch? Cost is a big one. More than safety or waste issues, cost is nuclear’s Achilles’ heel. Modern-day reactors have become jarringly expensive to build, going for $5 billion to $10 billion a pop. Worse, the price tag seems to be rising in many places. Back in the 1960s, new reactors in the US were one of the cheaper energy sources around. Two decades later, after a series of missteps, those costs had increased sixfold — a big reason we stopped building plants.

What Brad Plumer (a Voice of the Crust) will never mention, nor even allow himself to think, is that these cost are from litigation by eco-Nazis who see the word ‘nuclear’ and immediately hyperventilate and multiple oppressive layers of government regulation (largely in response to eco-Nazi political pressure).

Additional woes followed. In its 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision, the DC Circuit Court ordered nuclear regulators to change their rules to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. That opened the door for citizen lawsuits to intervene in the licensing and construction process, sometimes causing further slowdowns.

Oh, ya think?

Then nuclear suffered a mortal blow after the much-publicized (but nonfatal) meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Every reactor still under construction at the time — 51 in total — suddenly faced major regulatory delays, changes in safety procedures, and new back-fit requirements. Construction times doubled, stretching out past 10 years. Costs went through the roof, past $7,000/kW for some reactors:

In other words, government regulations and bureaucratic delays.

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Oregon is currently struggling with a $22 billion pension deficit. This is a problem that has been growing for years, and just last month, Gov. Kate Brown announced a plan to sell $5 billion worth of public assets to aid the fight against the state’s deficit.

According to Brown, everything could be sold, for the right price, except for state forests, parks and prisons.

In this week’s exciting episode, Democrats learn the facts of life, that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics requires all 100 U.S. senators to file detailed financial disclosures generally cataloging what they own and what they owe each year. Senators must also itemize all the gifts and free trips they have received from private sources.

Sanders, who emphasized government transparency during his 2016 presidential campaign, also completely blew off Senate Ethics Committee financial documentation filing deadlines in 2012, 2014 and 2015.

Damn, those rich white people are just a bunch of scumbags.

Once the revolution comes, they’ll all go to the wall, believe it.

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And you know that New York State doesn’t do government on the cheap. Lot of pigs at that trough.

The single-payer health care plan that cleared the lower chamber of New York’s state legislature on Tuesday would require massive tax increases to double—or possibly even quadruple—the state’s current annual revenue levels.

The state Assembly voted 87-38 on Tuesday night to pass the New York Health Plan, which would abolish private insurance plans in the state and provide all New Yorkers (except those enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare) with health insurance through the state government. The same proposal cleared the state Assembly in 2015 and 2016, but never received a vote from the state Senate.

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I think they ought to be obliged to live with it for the next ten years.

“Jerry Brown’s decision to push through the largest gas tax increase in California’s history without the approval of voters demonstrated a complete disregard for ordinary Californians,” Allen said.

Welcome to the wonderful world of a Blue State.

“This ballot initiative will correct Brown’s failure and allow the people of California to decide for themselves if they want to raise their taxes.” The measure needs 365,880 signatures to go on the 2018 ballot.

Good luck finding that many sane people in California.

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Just looking at the picture, I’m fully behind the notion of none of those people reproducing.

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The National Science Foundation awarded a professor over $200,000 to research microaggressions. Specifically, her research seeks to identify how microagressions keep racial minorities from comprising a larger chunk of science, technology, engineering and mathematics jobs, and it seeks ways to improve minority representation in these fields.

The Social Justice Warriors of the Crust take care of their own — at YOUR expense, of course.

‘Hey, whitey, give me all your money in exchange for my telling you what an asshole you are.’

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Officials at the University of Missouri’s flagship campus in Columbia have announced a plan to cut approximately 400 jobs and raise tuition in the face of a projected 7.4 percent plunge in student enrollment and a $14.7 million state budget cut.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 employees will simply lose their jobs at the taxpayer-funded school. The rest of the job cuts will come either because people are retiring or because the school won’t renew the contracts of non-tenured professors, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

It’s very simple — nobody wants to spend money for the opportunity to get run over by a crowd of rampaging NAMs at a University that nobody cares about. They’ll put up with that shit to get an Ivy League degree, but cheap-ass government schools aren’t worth it.

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Government employement means never having to say you’re working.

I’m predicting that very few of these guys is Republican.

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Former Democratic Rep. Corrine Brown of Florida was found guilty Thursday of 18 of the 22 charges brought against her in a corruption case.

The charges include conspiring to commit mail and wire fraud, lying on financial disclosure forms, obstructing the IRS, taking money from a charity that claimed to be providing scholarships to underprivileged students and falsifying information on tax returns.

Democrats — party of corruption since before the Civil War.

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The Senate could not muster the votes Wednesday to overturn an Obama-era regulation on methane emissions from oil and gas drilling operations on federal lands.

The Senate voted 51 to 49 in favor of the Interior Department rule, with Arizona Republican John McCain surprisingly casting the deciding vote to support the Obama administration regulation.

Somebody needs to remind John McCain which party he’s in.

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Property rights? In California? Hahahahaha….

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The Democrats who attacked President Trump’s travel order in front of carefully-selected Democratic judges made the extraordinary claim that the President’s statements on the stump, as a candidate, were somehow relevant to whether the order was constitutional. This claim implies that an order may be unconstitutional if issued by one president, while the exact same order would be perfectly fine if issued by another. This is an absurd result.

It may be absurd, but it is what the Democrats believe. ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

Get a list of the top ten cities with the most murders per year and then see how many of them are run by Democrats. (Hell, do the top twenty-five, you’ll get the same result.)

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Somebody should tell Hillary that the reason nobody asked Trump about jobs during the debates is that they knew he would do something about jobs, not just talk about jobs the way Democrats always do.

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As a presidential candidate in 2008, Barack Obama had promised repeatedly that he would not raise any tax on any American earning less than $250,000 per year. He broke the promise when he signed Obamacare.

Well, he’s a Democrat. Lying is what they do.

With the passage of the House GOP bill, tens of millions of middle income Americans will get tax relief from Obamacare’s long list of tax hikes.

A step in the right direction.

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Poor Connecticut. The nutmeg state didn’t have an income tax for a long time, but finally adopted one in 1991 because of course the state couldn’t possibly balance its budget without one. And naturally the rate has been slowly rising. The state went from three tax brackets to seven two years ago. But guess what?

It means the current budget year, which ends in just two months, is now seriously in the red and next year’s deficit has ballooned to $2.2 billion.

It’s happening because the state of Connecticut depends too much on its wealthy residents, and wealthy residents are leaving, and the ones that are staying are making less, or are not taking their profits from the stock market until they see what happens in Washington.

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Middle school teacher Yvette Felarca, a prominent BAMN organizer, repeatedly abused her position as an educator to push left-wing activist causes, the school district claimed.

Despite repeated warnings, the district says, Felarca continued to try to recruit students into her radical organization, including during work hours. Felarca frequently tried to bring students on school-sponsored trips to BAMN-related activities, which the district claimed were attempts to “indoctrinate” the students, according to Berkeleyside.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Democrats — best politicians money can buy.

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A government watchdog withheld at least 14 reports that revealed department-wide problems that allow fraud and waste at a cabinet-level agency, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s (TheDCNF) Investigative Group has learned.

The reports concern issues plaguing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), including felons illegally living in federally-funded homes, tax fraud and millions of dollars sitting in unused bank accounts for years. The department’s 2017 budget is $48.9 billion and it has 8,375 employees.