Nevada forfeiture law provides paltry protection for property owners from wrongful forfeitures. The government may seize your property and keep it upon a showing of clear and convincing evidence, a higher standard than many states but still lower than the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. But the burden falls on you to prove that you are an innocent owner by showing that the act giving rise to the forfeiture was done without your knowledge, consent or willful blindness. Further, law enforcement keeps 100 percent of the revenue raised from the sale of forfeited property. Additionally, the revenue must be spent within the year, because any excess more than $100,000 in a forfeiture account is given to local schools. This provision creates an incentive to rely on new forfeitures each year. Nevada law enforcement officials are supposed to report on forfeiture, but they did not respond to requests for information.
Thanks to everyone who came to the Henderson Tea Party and was interested in the Nevada Policy Research Institute's Legislative report card. I'm sorry we ran out of hard copies, but as promised, you can read the whole report here.
*Florida's low-income students outscore the statewide average of all Nevada students.
*Florida's Hispanic students outscore the statewide average of all Nevada students.
*Florida's African American students tie the statewide average of all Nevada students.
*Education or health care? Voting for ObamaCare may be a vote against education funding.The passage last night of Barack Obama's health care reform bill through the House of Representatives is yet another blow to freedom in America inflicted by the Obama administration. The legislation, which comes at a staggering cost of $940 billion, will hugely add to the already towering national debt, now at over $12 trillion. It is yet another millstone round the necks of the American people, already faced with the highest levels of unemployment in a generation.
It is also a great leap forward by the United States towards a European-style vision of universal health care, which will only lead to soaring costs, higher taxes, and a surge in red tape for small businesses. This reckless legislation dramatically expands the power of the state over the lives of individuals, and could not be further from the vision of America's founding fathers. It has also been rushed through Congress without proper scrutiny, in the face of overwhelming public opposition, and with not an ounce of bipartisan support.
*The state legislature should ban collective bargaining for public-sector unions before we're all squeezed.During moments like this, I believe it's important to remember why we have worked so hard for so long. That's why I spoke to the country Monday at a gathering in Ohio and said it plainly: I'm here for Natoma.But the truth is the system is working for Natoma right now. She's getting treatment at one the best hospitals in the world and she's in the process of qualifying for government or private aid.
Natoma Canfield is like most of us: She works hard, and tries to do what's right. Years ago, she had battled back from cancer, so she always maintained health insurance in case she ever really needed it again. But because of her medical history, the insurance company kept raising her deductible and her premiums.
Last year alone, Natoma paid over $10,000 in monthly premiums and co-pays, while her insurance company chipped in just $900. And then they hiked up her rates another 40%. She simply couldn't afford it -- she had to cancel her policy. That's when she wrote to me. I read her letter, and shared her story with insurance company CEOs as another reason why the system has to change.
That was two weeks ago. Then, just last week, the unthinkable happened: Natoma collapsed, and was rushed to a hospital. It's leukemia -- the cancer has returned. Now she's in the hospital, worried sick not just about her condition, but how she'll financially survive.
So why am I still in this fight? Simple. I'm here for Natoma.
Though Canfield's sister Connie Anderson said her sibling is afraid she'll lose her house and Obama warned at an Ohio rally Monday that the patient is "racked with worry" about the cost of tests and treatment, she is already being screened for financial help.At least he's consistent. He's lied about the stimulus and transparency. Why not health care as well?
Lyman Sornberger, executive director of patient financial services at the Cleveland Clinic, said "all indications" at the outset are that she will be considered for assistance.
"She may be eligible for state Medicaid ... and/or she will be eligible for charity (care) of some form or type. ... In my personal opinion, she will be eligible for something," he said, adding that Canfield should not be worried about losing her home.
"Cleveland Clinic will not put a lien on her home," he said.
Cleveland Clinic offers personal guides to patients like Canfield who are concerned about payment to try to match them up with programs that can provide full or partial assistance. One option is state Medicaid coverage, which Canfield did not have when she was admitted. Another is charity care that is routinely provided by the hospital, which is a nonprofit. Cleveland Clinic reported providing $99 million in charity care in 2008.
Top FOUR Dem Leaders All Disagree...BLOOMBERG: Pelosi Says Dems to Have Votes for Health Bill... THE HILL: Hoyer Shoots Down Larson's Vote Count, Clyburn's Timeline...THE HILL: Clyburn Says Health Vote Could Push Past Easter Holiday...POLITICO: Larson Says Dems Have the Votes...
Twentieth century economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that middling firms are "creatively" destroyed by good firms, which are themselves eventually eliminated by still better competitors. Ignoring this basic economic principle, critics of charter schools and other forms of school choice see no hope for competition in education. These critics ask us to leave public schools alone apart from creating voluntary national standards—speed zones without traffic tickets, as it were.Peterson on charter schools:
Yet few doubt that public schools today are troubled, as the president noted on Saturday. What the president left out is that the performance of American high school students has hardly budged over the past 40 years, while the per-pupil cost of operating the schools they attend has increased threefold in real dollar terms. If school districts were firms operating in the market place, many would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter's law of creative destruction.
To identify the effects of a charter education, a wide variety of studies have been conducted. The best studies are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and educational research. Stanford University's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University's Thomas Kane have conducted randomized experiments that compare students who win a charter lottery with those who applied but were not given a seat. Winners and losers can be assumed to be equally motivated because they both tried to go to a charter school. Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Kane have found that lottery winners subsequently scored considerably higher on math and reading tests than did applicants who remained in district schools.
In another good study, the RAND Corp. found that charter high school graduation rates and college attendance rates were better than regular district school rates by 15 percentage points and eight percentage points respectively.
Instead of taking seriously these high quality studies, charter critics rely heavily on a report released in 2004 by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT is hardly a disinterested investigator, and its report makes inappropriate comparisons and pays insufficient attention to the fact that charters are serving an educationally deprived segment of the population. Others base their criticism of charters on a report from an ongoing study by Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (Credo), which found that there are more weak charter schools than strong ones. Though this report is superior to AFT's study, its results are dominated by a large number of students who are in their first year at a charter school and a large number of charter schools that are in their first year of operation.
So why do we need public universities in the first place? Free markets are wonderful at giving more to those who already have, and private universities such as Harvard and Stanford are among the best in the world. But as my colleague Maureen Kilkenny, a respected economist in a department slated for elimination, says, “markets can do nothing for people with nothing.” For those who lack education, skills or family wealth, the free market offers little hope for improvement. By paying taxes to provide education, we help to level the playing field.There is no easier place for Dr. Parker and Dr. Kilkenny to prove their point than by examining the poorest places on planet Earth. If they are correct, we should see the poor either suffering with unaffordable private schools or succeeding with free government-run schools. We'll focus on K-12 education because without a foundation, no one can go to college.
While working with Mayor Oscar Goodman six years ago to finance a baseball stadium and lure the Expos to it, he [Lou Weisbach, CEO of Stadium Capital Financing Group] came up with a stadium financing plan that The Wall Street Journal dubbed a “sports mortgage.”I'm glad Commissioner Giunchigliani is skeptical, because some businesses try to pull a bait and switch when it comes to rejecting and then accepting government handouts. But if it turns out that Weisbach really means, "No taxpayer help. None,” then more power to him.
Weisbach’s financing plan works like this:
His company sells seating and luxury boxes in much the same way developers sell homes.
The buyers are able to finance their purchased seats over several decades, similar to a home mortgage. They, of course, retain the right to later sell their seats for a profit or transfer them to another owner.
“As the value of tickets goes up, that would create value in that seat,” Weisbach said.
Last year, the University of Kansas and University of California, Berkeley, used the “Equity Seat Right” system to pay for expansions and renovations of their football stadiums.
“It would be great to be able to help facilitate an arena in the place where this idea was born,” Weisbach said, referring to Las Vegas.
At Berkeley, 3,000 seats were put up for sale, with the most expensive going for $175,000 to $200,000, financed over 50 years. Other seats were sold for as little as $40,000 over a 40-year term.
In September, Berkeley reported getting commitments from buyers for 2,000 seats…
The two arena plans, as proposed, would require the Clark County Commission to sign off on the sale of bonds or a hike in the sales tax to pay for the projects. But Weisbach’s plan, because it doesn’t require public financing, would require little say from the commission, beyond zoning and other planning-related issues…
Still, some are sure to point to Southern Nevada’s experience with the financially troubled monorail. It was built with private money and might end up being bailed out by taxpayers.
Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani expressed skepticism that an arena could truly be financed without public assistance, saying the “devil is in the details.”
Taxpayer assistance, she noted, isn’t always “a direct dollar” thing. Even if no upfront investment is required, taxpayers could end up paying for it on the back end through dwindling tax collections, tax exemptions or being on the hook for debt if the plan doesn’t work.
“In this business climate, we first need to have a survey of whether Southern Nevadans even want an arena and would use it,” she said.
In response to such questions, Weisbach was firm: “No taxpayer help. None.”
Nevada has some big decisions to make in the 2010 elections and the 2011 legislative session. Should we rein in spending or maintain an unsustainable rate of spending increases by raising taxes (which will lead to more tax increases in the future)?They are lessons that are particularly vivid when you contrast Texas, the nation's second most populous state, with the most populous, California. Both were once Mexican territory, secured for the United States in the 1840s. Both have grown prodigiously over the past half-century. Both have populations that today are about one-third Hispanic.
But they differ vividly in public policy and in their economic progress — or lack of it — over the last decade. California has gone in for big government in a big way. Democrats hold big margins in the legislature largely because affluent voters in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area favor their liberal positions on cultural issues.
Those Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that state government faces huge budget deficits. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's attempt to reduce the power of the Democratic-union combine with referenda was defeated in 2005 when public employee unions poured $100 million — all originally extracted from taxpayers — into effective TV ads.
Californians have responded by leaving the state. From 2000 to 2009, the Census Bureau estimates, there has been a domestic outflow of 1,509,000 people from California — almost as many as the number of immigrants coming in. Population growth has not been above the national average and, for the first time in history, it appears that California will gain no House seats or electoral votes from the reapportionment following the 2010 census.
Texas is a different story. Texas has low taxes — and no state income taxes — and a much smaller government. Its legislature meets for only 90 days every two years, compared with California's year-round legislature. Its fiscal condition is sound. Public employee unions are weak or nonexistent.
But Texas seems to be delivering superior services. Its teachers are paid less than California's. But its test scores — and with a demographically similar school population — are higher. California's once fabled freeways are crumbling and crowded. Texas has built gleaming new highways in metro Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.
In the meantime, Texas' economy has been booming. Unemployment rates have been below the national average for more than a decade, as companies small and large generate new jobs.
And Americans have been voting for Texas with their feet. From 2000 to 2009, some 848,000 people moved from other parts of the United States to Texas, about the same number as moved in from abroad. That inflow has continued in 2008-09, in which 143,000 Americans moved into Texas, more than double the number in any other state, at the same time as 98,000 were moving out of California. Texas is on the way to gain four additional House seats and electoral votes in the 2010 reapportionment.
It's a ploy by the tax-and-spend crowd to quantify just how crummy Nevada is as a state so that legislators with a public employee union election base can use it to as a fulcrum to raise taxes and waste more of your money.Thank you, sir. May I have another?! Why, yes I can.
You think I'm overstating the case? Then take a look at who legislators selected as members of the stakeholder panel. One group, representing about 5 percent of Nevadans miraculously found a way to get appointed to 47 percent of the voting positions. Can you guess what group that was?
Right you are, sir! Ding, ding, ding!
Nine of the 19 "stakeholders" are either government employees, retired government employees or public employee union executives.
In the end, there will be a report. Testimony will be heard. And after every last dog and pony dies of exhaustion, the show will provide political cover for the mindless mother of all tax increases in the 2011 Legislature.Right there — in one paragraph — is the liberals’ game plan for the next 18 months.
As the Associated Press reports, President Obama is now running a full-court press to try to get House Democrats to pass the Senate version of Obamacare within the next ten days. The president is leaving for Indonesia and Australia on March 18, and he wants the House to pass his proposed $2.5 trillion, 2,700-page overhaul of our nation's health-care system in time for him to sign it into law before he boards the plane.Read Anderson's full post here.
The president is also imploring Americans to "Make your voice heard." Never has he given such sound advice.
The health-care debate has now come down to this: Can one man's desires prevail over those of 150,000,000 Americans (the difference between the roughly 225 million who oppose Obamacare and the roughly 75 million who support it)? Can one man — through coercion, threats, and payoffs — prove to be more persuasive to individual Democratic members of Congress than the collective voice of their constituents — expressed through calls, letters, rallies, and marches? Can one man convince Democratic members that their vote on Obamacare doesn't matter (and that they shouldn't care even if it did), or can their constituents convince them that it DOES matter (and that they better care)?
There are only five minutes left in the game. The legs are heavier, the arms wearier, the arc on the jump-shots flatter. And now it's just a question of will.
How many private employers have anything close to these pay-and-benefits packages? Many union contracts require an annual wage increase, which has become a rarity in the past few years outside of government. And although many private employers have cut their match for retirement pay because of the recession, state law requires governments to pay at least half of their employees’ contribution to the state pension fund.While some may be surprised to read these words in the Sun, what the editorial is saying is simply common sense. Controlling government expenditures and eliminating waste shouldn't be a conservative, Republican or libertarian issue - it is an idea all Nevadans can support. Using taxpayer resources effectively allows the state to provide high-quality services at a low cost.
The bottom line is that if the state and local governments are to get a handle on their budget problems, they will have to address the level of pay-and-benefits packages for public employees and reduce costs. Otherwise the level of needed services will decline more as government budgets will unacceptably be eroded by payroll.
Gaming giant Harrah’s Entertainment’s ability to steer clear of bankruptcy while carrying massive debt through the Great Recession has many people wanting to know its secret.Government institutions, however, react in a much different way when faced with difficult decisions.
But when two key executives gave a Las Vegas business organization an inside look at what Harrah’s did to survive, some of the moves turned out to be surprisingly simple — time-honored formulas of hard-nosed cost-cutting and getting back to basics.
Jan Jones, Harrah’s senior vice president of communications and government relations, recalled how she tried to fight dramatic cuts to her budget in 2008 by arguing her case with CEO Gary Loveman.
“I took all my information to Gary and told him he was putting the business at a huge risk (by cutting her budget). He said to me, ‘If what it takes to save this business means that I have to close the entire corporate office, that is what I will do. These are your numbers. Make them work.’ And then he got up and he left.
“Looking back at it, I know now that it really took a leader who was saying, ‘Hey, get over it.’ ” …
Within nine months, Halkyard said Harrah’s cut $550 million in annual costs. (Emphasis added)
During its recent special session, the Legislature cut education funding by 6.9 percent. The higher education system’s presidents are preparing to eliminate certain programs, services and staff as a result.Now, keep in mind that the NSHE is facing a cut of less than half of the 6.9 percent number that's been reported, as Regent Ron Knecht explains.
Eric Sandgren, dean of the College of Engineering, said the five programs could be on the cutting board because they are some of the most expensive programs on campus.
“There’s nothing we can sacrifice without damaging the university,” Sandgren said. (Emphasis added)
The Legislature will be cutting only our general fund allocations, which supply 35 percent of our $1.7 billion operating budget.(Side note: If you haven't read his entire op-ed, stop reading this and read it now. I'll still be here when you’re done.)
But if out economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama’s stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That’s a 7.9 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:· At one of President Obama’s many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
· Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”
· Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”
The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over.
When state Sen. James Meeks asks fellow Democrats to give education vouchers to kids who attend some of the worst schools in Chicago, the legislators often tell him they don't want to divert dollars from public education.Illinois isn't the only state that has public schools that are failing students. Just-released math scores in Clark County leave much to be desired.
Meeks' response: "If the public schools are not doing their job, why do you want to continue to reward them with money?"
Good question.
We have yet to hear a good answer.
Meeks is trying valiantly to shake up the status quo in public education, and we stand with him in that effort. He is pushing a solid plan to create a voucher program for Chicago. The Senate's executive subcommittee on education is set to discuss the bill on Wednesday.
A discussion about vouchers always gets the hackles up. It prompts charges that proponents want to abandon public schools.
So we think it's time to frame the question a little differently.
The Chicago Public Schools system isn't failing for lack of trying. The system is in the midst of an ambitious and controversial effort — Renaissance 2010 — to give new options to children in the worst schools. Sometimes, that means taking the dramatic step of closing schools and opening new ones.
This week, President Barack Obama announced a $900 million plan to reward school districts that overhaul or close failing schools and send kids to new public schools.
We're encouraged by the Chicago effort and applaud Obama's aggressive approach to school reform.
But we ask: Why not do more of this, at less cost and with a much larger universe?
First-semester results on the district tests for 2009-10 show 21 percent of high school students passed the Algebra 1 test while 43 percent passed the exam for Geometry.Fortunately, the Nevada Policy Research Institute has a detailed study on a tax-credit program that would allow parents to choose schools for their children and save Nevada $1 billion in the next 10 years.
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