Pretty good article by the N&R’s Richard Barron on the corporate takeover of the Piedmont Triad Partnership, another one of those —-as commenter ‘Farmartist’ puts it —– ‘private bureaucracies’ that ‘market’ the Triad.
But I’ll cut to the chase: BB&T’s Kelly King and his gang are coming to the rescue after PTP ran through the $15 [...]

According to the Associated Press, on Saturday the Washington State Senate narrowly approved a spending-budget cart without a tax-package horse to precede it.
 
Per the AP story:

Lawmakers are trying to bridge a $2.8 billion deficit, which represents the gap between current state spending and expected tax collections through June 2011. The Legislature solved a $9 billion deficit last year through a combination of spending cuts, one-time accounting fixes and billions of dollars in federal bailouts.

 
This year’s Senate budget plan calls for about $830 million in spending cuts, along with the roughly $920 million in tax increases. Another $500 million would come from fund transfers and other one-time fixes, with federal assistance penciled in for about $580 million. Some $525 million would be left in reserves.
 
The Senate’s GOP minority, with little power to affect the final outcome, said the Democratic budget plan was far too speculative and didn’t seek to seriously reduce the long-term cost of state government.

How to pay for it? Under discussion are a combination of the budget cuts, a sales-tax hike, closing some so-called “tax loopholes” and raising the cigarette tax $1 per pack. None of these are final, however.
 
The “fund transfers” mentioned in the AP story may come back to haunt the Legislature. Sweeping cash out of designated accounts in order to dump it into the general fund to pay daily bills is like raiding your kids’ college fund in order to continue to subsidize a luxurious lifestyle.
 
Speaking of raiding college funds, in their proposed budgets both the Senate and the House targeted any number of designated education accounts for looting to fund the general budget, including the popular Education Savings Account program that is seen all the time in television advertisements.
 
Looking at the capital and general budget proposals makes talk of how necessary it is to raise taxes to fund education look hypocritical since education account after education account are getting sucked dry. In addition to over $100 million out of ESA, accounts for capital and construction projects for five state universities and community and technical colleges, scholarships for future teachers, and others total millions more.
 
Also, consider the reliance upon federal assistance. Just how long would your parents be willing to send you hundreds of millions of dollars giving you the ability to not live within your means?
 
What about the failure of state government to step up to the plate on spending for the Washington State Heritage Center, as our own Brett Davis wrote about recently? Of course, the Secretary of State’s office protests vehemently claiming the project creates jobs.
 
Take the effort to eliminate the successful K-7 Online Learning program while talk continues to include dubiously effective early learning programs, which would inure to the benefit of teachers’ unions, as Diana Cieslak wrote about.
 
Finally – not really, but three examples will suffice – what about the governor’s failure to address state employee compensation and benefits?  As Amber Gunn wrote, the means and opportunity are there to get state worker unions to the bargaining table to negotiate some reality into collective bargaining agreements that are far more lucrative than contracts in the private sector. Is it good policy or better politics that causes her to ignore this savings opportunity?
 
Legislators talk about how hard they’re working and how painful the cuts they’re “forced” to make will be. Rarely do they mention the pain experienced by those who pay the tab.
 
The Piper

The N&R weighs in on more talk about privatizing the Greensboro Coliseum. Personally, I’ll believe it when I see it; there’s a reason —-which we probably can’t begin to comprehend —– why Matt Brown is the city’s highest-paid employee.
As for City Council member Robbie Perkins’ idea to create a coliseum authority, remember that an ‘authority’ [...]

According to the Oregonian, Portland Public Schools will spend 218 million dollars in 2009-2010 for teacher’s salaries. They have fewer than 4,000 teachers. Do the math. That is $54,500 PER TEACHER AVERAGE cost for this school year. Doesn’t se…

With Democrats looking at budget reconciliation to bypass a Senate filibuster and pass their health care “reform” bills, it’s worth noting what leading Democrat politicians said a few years ago about using procedural rules to avoid a filibuster:

I think NakedEmporerNews

National Public Radio recently noted the closing of a 52 floor office tower in downtown Dallas, and took this symbolic act to muse on the future of downtowns. More specifically, is the era of the high-rise office building over?

It’s an interesting question, and I mused on this a while ago on my blog at Planetizen.com in a post titled “The Myth of the Urban Core.” The short answer: Yes, but the hyper dense downtown and associated high-rises were historical artifacts to begin with and unsustainable. High-rise office buildings were products of several forces coming together all at once: revolutionary increases in wealth, very low mobility (no cars), and rapid improvement transportation technologies that move people vertically (elevators). Their continued construction in the post-World War II ere had more to do with ego and urban politics than economic value or efficiency.

It’s a debate long overdue, and may well change the way we perceive policies such as Smart Growth.

What if you took away all of the profits of all of the health insurance companies? What would happen?

I know the general conclusion is that nothing useful came out of the Health Care Summit in Washington—the one where all the Republicans finall…

The Supreme Court is poised to make the next big decision on gun rights. Damon Root breaks it down and some broader implications for economic liberty.

In sum, the 14th Amendment was designed to protect an individualistic and market-oriented form of self-ownership, one that includes the right to armed self-defense, the right to private property, the right to liberty of contract, and the right to pursue an honest living free from arbitrary and unnecessary government interference. That’s the libertarian promise of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. And that’s why Tuesday’s arguments in McDonald v. Chicago matter for both gun rights and economic liberty.

John O’Leary takes an insightful look at how the mess Katrina left behind became the best thing to happen to NOL schools in a long time. 

The outrage is that it took the natural disaster of Katrina to deal with the man-made disaster of New Orleans’ schools. It shouldn’t take a hurricane to bring real change to a failing urban education system. But it did.

. . .

In our book on public sector transformation, we cite urban education as one example of the “complacency trap,” which occurs whenever the way things are block the path to what might be. Beating the complacency trap means embracing the power of creative destruction, the organizational equivalent of pruning a bush to make room for new growth.

Public education reforms have historically focused on trying to make the system work, rather than reexamining the system itself. Results have been meager. No doubt, transformative change is painful, but isn’t it more painful to watch generation after generation of children robbed of an education? Should it really take a hurricane to do the right thing for the children?