Next time you put money into a parking meter, you are cheating your city out of one of its most important taxes. Long, long ago, parking fines were meant for punishing scofflaws, keeping streets safe and providing for a free flow of traffic and turnover in business districts. That was then, this is now. Parking […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)The congressional Democratic party’s “there is no social security crisis” belies both past rhetoric (see: Al Gore campaign, 2000) and objective analysis.
Will there be a major problem? The 2004 report of the Trustees (http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/TR/TR04/tr04.pdf) shows the pay-as-you-go plan currently takes in $632b (2003) from 154m working Americans and paid $471b to 47m retirees. That’s $4.1k […]
Wy is it that Calfornia’s educational elite so consistently undermines and underserves the very people it is supposed to educate? From the Oakland School District’s appropriately ridiculed Eubonics (set your spellchecker to use “Ebonics!” — ed.) debacle to the more recent decision to dump Reed Hastings from the State Board of Education, California consistently fails […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Nothing is wrong with sending aid to those in need. With the unprecendented magnitude of human suffering resulting from the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the outpooring of worldwide aid is a natural and beneficial reaction. God Bless us all!
However, there is some not so good that can come from all of this giving. First off, if […]
If you read the news, you know about the prison population “crisis” where domestic prison populations have literally exploded over the past two decades. An odd thing about this though and one that doesn’t get written about is the correlating drop in violent crime rate. Stated simply, as our country’s prison populations have swelled, our […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Since two national holidays — Labor Day and MLK Day* — celebrate Democratic Party interest groups, do the Republicans get to keep pace now that they control the presidency and both houses of Congress? Do we need a national Guns and Butter Day? Will they bring back Flag Day? Reverse the long term decline of […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Amongst the devastation that was once CBS News, survivors of this week’s critical independent report on the once proud news organization began picking through the carnage in the news division with many openly worrying about their futures. But with so much rebuilding to do, survivors had scant time to mourn the losses of missing staffers. […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)While perusing the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (link)(table 686) (don’t ask), I came across some data that show the progress made by black families over the last 25 years. In 1980, 49% of black families earned under $25,000 per year. In 2001, in constant dollars 37.4% did. That’s a 24% reduction in the poor […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)50 miles north of Los Angeles is a small ocenside hamlet of La Conchita. It is an odd collection of 100 or homes and a population of 300 or so people. In 1995, tradegy struck in the form of a massive landslide. Despite massive litigation trying to prove otherwise it was clear to anyone with […]
(click on post title, or here, for the rest)Independent Sources is a blog with a few organizing notions:
- there is such a thing as common sense
- problems can have objectively rational solutions
- economics explains more human behavior than it’s given credit for
We’d say we’re “fair and balanced” except that we feel that since we’re right most of the time, there’s no need to […]
