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Telecom
Municipalities: Broadband Is Not a ‘Core Utility’
In response to a recent White House report that municipality broadband is a “core utility… like water, sewer and electricity,” Scott Cleland, the president of Precursor LLC, argues broadband services are not utilities and must not be treated as such. “In sum, if broadband is not a ‘natural monopoly,’ it is unnatural to subject broadband to monopoly utility price regulation, and for a municipality to force a government subsidized, favored, and advantaged broadband network on a competitive broadband marketplace. Any fair and fact-based analysis by a municipality will confirm that broadband networks do not have any of the natural physical or economic characteristics of public utility services. The relevant facts here are clear: competitive broadband service is nothing like water, sewer or electricity utilities.” Read more
Budget and Tax
California, Texas Share Big Pension, Retirement Liabilities
Sheila Weinberg, the founder and CEO of Truth in Accounting, examines how elected officials in California and Texas have chosen to ignore the mounting debt of their government worker retirement programs in this Heartlander article. Weinberg argues the real debt of these states is obscured by the state government’s use of outdated accounting practices. “They plan to pay off services being used today at some point in the future by charging them to future taxpayers. This defies the intent of their states’ constitutional requirements for a balanced budget, and it ultimately forces their states’ taxpayers deeper into debt.” Read more
Education
College Board Rewrites Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards and History Itself
Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), describes his efforts to de-politicize the new College Board Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) standards, which guide history teachers in high school classrooms nationwide. The APUSH 2012 standards were, Wood writes, “largely political propaganda” and represented a “full-on deconstruction of American values.” While pushback from Wood, a group of professional historians, and the public at large forced the College Board to revise the APUSH standards and “strip out the conspicuous expressions of left-wing bias,” the “underlying [left-wing] narrative” remains in place. Read more
Energy and Environment
Report: Solar Industry Headed Toward a Financial Bubble
A new report by the Taxpayers Protection Alliance [JaJ1] (TPA) concludes the myriad government schemes designed to promote or require the use of solar energy threaten to create a financial bubble similar to the one that befell the housing sector in 2007–08. The TPA report, titled From Washington to Wall Street: How Government Policies Are Skewing Solar Investments, warns of the impending danger linked to the growing “solar bubble”: “Much like the government-created housing bubble, … handouts at the federal and state level are creating a solar bubble that taxpayers are propping up, and it will be the taxpayers and investors who take the hit when the industry comes crashing down.” Read more
Health Care
Ohio’s Medicaid Spending Increasing Rapidly Under Gov. Kasich
Kenneth Artz, writing for Health Care News, examines the rapid increase of Medicaid spending in Ohio under Gov. John Kasich (R), who is currently campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. Since Kasich took office, his state’s annual Medicaid spending has increased by around $6 billion, an increase of 30 percent from 2011–15, according to the Ohio Department of Medicaid.
“Averaged across Kasich’s first two budgets covering fiscal years 2012–13 and 2014–15, Medicaid spending increased by 7.4 percent per year. According to Kasich’s administration, Ohio’s Medicaid spending increased by 4.1 percent in fiscal year 2012; 2.5 percent in 2013; 10.6 percent in 2014; and 12.5 percent in 2015.” Read more
From Our Free-Market Friends
Media Research Center Study Reveals that CNN Spent 78 Percent of Prime Time GOP Campaign Coverage on Trump
A Media Research Center study finds, over a two week period, coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign took up nearly 78 percent of all CNN’s prime time GOP campaign coverage – 580 minutes out of a total of 747 minutes. All 16 non-Trump candidates received a combined total of just 167 minutes. More than half of the remaining candidate coverage, almost 12 percent of the total (88 minutes), went to Jeb Bush. Twelve of the 17 candidates received less than one percent of the coverage. Read more
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