Open source, procurement, and gov tech.
This interview with Rep. Michele Bachmann demonstrates everything that’s wrong with Republicans’ current political rhetoric about reducing the size of government: The good news is that Republicans are talking about cutting spending, rather than just cutting taxes. The former is too often ignored. The bad news is that there really doesn’t seem to be any …
Continue reading “Bachmann can’t name anything she’d cut from government.”
With all of the talk of big numbers in the budget and the bailout, it can be tough to maintain a sense of scale. Though the difference between a thousand and a million is very clear to me, the difference between a billion and a trillion is tough to grasp. Here’s an illustration of the …
Continue reading “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
President Obama has eliminated the stupid accounting tricks by the Bush administration and found the nation to be $2.7 trilliion more in debt over the next decade, Jackie Calmes writes in the New York Times. A Republican trashes the budget and leaves a Democrat to clean up the mess…shades of Jim Gilmore?
There’s bad news on the economic front: Bush’s budget deficit will hit the half-trillion dollar mark next year, which is precisely the opposite of what President Bush has been promising since he first sought the office. Let’s take a look back at each year’s budget news since 2000, the year before President Bush took office. …
Continue reading “Promises gone by: a Bush budget retrospective.”
A standard talking point among supporters of Gov. Jim Gilmore’s candidacy for U.S. Senate is that he left the state economy in great shape, but Gov. Mark Warner went ahead and hiked taxes anyway. They say it’s a myth that Gilmore fudged the budget numbers. In my world, this is an up-is-down, black-is-white claim. It’s …
Continue reading “A challenge to Virginia Republicans regarding Gilmore.”
Here’s a thought that hit me recently: In the long run, the cost of building infrastructure approaches free, while the cost of maintaining it is infinite. Roads are a prime example. Since the advent of paved roads maintained by the state and federal governments, roads haven’t gone away. Virginia never says “Hey, listen, this four …