Category Archives: News commentary

Last November, I wrote that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency ran the risk of following in the Clinton administration’s Reinventing Government footsteps. That program evaluated all sorts of ways to make government work better, but ended up doing almost nothing but laying off employees. The layoffs lasted only a few years, after which Congress restored the number of employees and agency budgets.

Gallatin National Forest; Forest Service photo.

Instead of simply cutting employees, I wrote, Musk should focus on creating new incentives for agencies to operate more efficiently and more effectively. “Such new incentives would focus agencies on the people they are supposed to serve rather than on simply increasing their budgets,” I added. “More important, if properly designed these would be lasting changes, not ones that would disappear as soon as the next administration takes office.” Continue reading →

The national debt is more than $36 trillion, which is about $110,000 for every man, woman, and other-gendered person in the United States. When I was in high school, the national debt was about $1,800 per person, and I remember wondering if I could afford to pay my share. At that time, it might have been possible to pay it off with a one-time tax on everyone; today, not so much.

Before World War II, the U.S. had a long history of going into debt during wartime and then paying off most of that debt between wars. The above chart shows that after 1945 we paid off some of the war-related debt, but then entered a 1984-like world of permanent hot or cold war, which led Congress to give up any notion of completely paying off the debt. Still, as shown in the chart below, after adjusting for inflation the debt per capita continued to decline until around 1974. Continue reading →

I was sad to learn that my friend, Cliff Slater, died earlier this week at the age of 92. Cliff was a genuine hero who worked hard to improve life for people in Hawaii and in particular devoted thousands of hours and lots of his own money fighting the Honolulu rail boondoggle.

Cliff Slater does battle with the rail transit cabal in this political cartoon by John Pritchett. Used with permission.

Born in England in June, 1933, Cliff grew up in Chingford, a suburb of London. After serving as an officer in the Royal Air Force, he moved to Hawaii in his 20s. In Maui, he met Jack Ackerman and Larry Windley, who had started a tourist diving company called Maui Divers. They had also discovered black coral beds and were making some of the coral into jewelry. Continue reading →

Last year was quite possibly the most politically tumultuous since at least 1884, when one presidential candidate was widely believed to have accepted bribes and the other was accused of rape. It seems predictable that, between DOGE, tariffs, immigration disputes, and international strife, 2025 will be even more politically fractious. Whether that’s a good thing may depend on your political persuasion.

Grizzly steps gingerly into the New Year.

Last year ended with the death of Jimmy Carter, who has often been described as a failed president but a great ex-president. Yet for the last few days we’ve been treated to a debate about just how bad a president he was and whether his post-presidency was all that was claimed. Continue reading →

This is the time of year when we think charitable thoughts about those less fortunate than ourselves and, if we can afford it, give to charities to help such people. But there are some charities that are hardly charitable.

Excerpt from IRS form 990 submitted by Mercy Housing showing amounts paid to its top staff members. Click image for a larger view.

In order to qualify for tax-deductible donations, non-profits must persuade the Internal Revenue Service that they are a charitable organization. Such organizations, says the IRS, are “organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational, or other specified purposes.” Continue reading →

Before the election, Elon Musk said he could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts. After the election, he scaled that back to $0.5 trillion. Now that interest alone on the national debt is exceeding $1 trillion a year, a half-trillion cut isn’t going to be enough. Here are a few ways the federal government could save billions of dollars a year.

1. End affordable housing programs. Research has shown that these programs, led by low-income housing tax credits, mainly benefit developers, not people who can’t afford housing. This is partly because they don’t significantly increase housing supply because, researchers have found, for every five subsidized housing units built, developers build four fewer non-subsidized units. As a result, and contrary to popular belief, these programs do nothing to improve overall housing affordability. Affordable housing programs have become particularly inefficient in recent years as spending on low-income housing has doubled even as the number of units built each year has declined. Savings: At least $11 billion a year.

Continue reading →

As co-leaders of a “Department of Government Efficiency,” Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are tasked by President-elect Trump with finding ways to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.” Judging from recent tweets from Musk and others, this effort will be all about finding and cutting government waste.

We’ve been down this road before and it leads to a dead end. Back in 1993, less than two weeks after Bill Clinton took office, Penguin books released Reinventing Government, a book that promised to “transform the public sector.” Clinton was so enamored with the ideas in the book that he quickly created a National Partnership for Reinventing Government whose goal was to make a government that “that works better and costs less.” Clinton placed his vice-president, Al Gore, in charge of the “partnership.” Continue reading →

Since it appears increasingly likely that the winner of the popular vote for president will not win the election, we are already seeing calls to “dump the electoral college.” Predictably, since the Democrat is the candidate who is likely to win the vote but lose the election, these calls are coming from Democrat supporters, while conservatives are supporting of the status quo. But if the situation were reversed — if the Republican were winning the popular vote but losing the election — I’m certain we would be hearing conservatives say we need to abolish the electoral college.

Seven states are currently undecided, so those are the states where candidates are doing most of their campaigning. Source: Real Clear Polling.

I want to abolish the electoral college not because of how it would change the outcome of this particular election but because of how it would change democracy. The United States is known for its low voter turnouts, and a large part of that is because many people don’t believe their vote counts. When it comes to the presidential election, those people are absolutely right unless they live in one of the “battleground states,” which this year are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Because presidential politics get more media attention than, say, gubernatorial or legislative politics, people who don’t think their vote for president counts are also less likely to vote in other elections. Continue reading →