In case you missed it…
Ed choice event
Join us after work on May 10th for a “School Choice Happy Hour!” The event will be held in Summerlin, at Honey Salt restaurant, at 5:30 pm — and we’re providing the beer and wine! Tim Keller, of the Institute for Justice will be the evening’s keynote speaker. Tim played a critical role in defending Nevada’s educational choice options, and will be discussing what can be done to expand choice in the Silver State in the year ahead. Just give the NPRI office a call to let us know if you can make it. (View the details of the event, and how to RSVP, here)
Transparency
Transparency in government leads to a government that is more accountable to the very taxpayers it ostensibly serves. Riverside Public Utilities in California, for example, didn’t previously have any systems in place to monitor overtime pay for its employees. But it does now, thanks to NPRI’s multistate transparency project. TransparentCalifornia.com — a website run by NPRI as a sister site to TransparentNevada.com — reported on overtime abuses within the department in 2017, and things immediately started to change. The utility now says it has put overtime regulations in place to help combat the abuse Transparent California exposed. (Read more)
Welfare
“Universal Basic Income” is a concept long championed by welfare advocates — and even a few free-market thinkers — as a more effective safety-net than the modern web of government welfare programs. The idea is simple enough: The government guarantees a minimum income amount for citizens, even if they are unable to find work or earn their own income. The Finnish government was the first European country to experiment with the idea — but it didn’t last long. Now the Finnish government says it is ending the program because the guaranteed income appears to deprive individuals of motivation to find gainful employment. (Read more)
Fiscal and taxes
Nevada’s Commerce Tax — a gross-receipts tax on businesses with more than $4 million in annual revenue — does not impact all industries equally. NPRI published an analysis of the tax last year that showed the inequality of the tax’s burden on different Nevada industries. (Read that analysis here.) Tracking down that important information wasn’t easy, given that the state tax department originally claimed it didn’t actually have the data. (Read more on that here.) NPRI’s reporting, however, has paid off in a key win for public transparency: Nevada’s Tax Department now provides an industry-specific breakdown of all Commerce Tax revenues right on its website. (Read more)
Culture
Increasingly, so-called progressives show serious intolerance for anyone diverging from their “politically correct” thinking ruts. This was on display again this last week, when outrage sprung up over the fact that Chick-fil-A — a company that subscribes to traditional Christian values — is doing successful business in the progressive enclave of Manhattan. (How dare it!) According to a piece written in The New Yorker, some progressives simply can’t understand why the restaurant is proving to be so popular with NYC residents. (Read more)
Government bias
Despite a law that prohibits the Center for Disease Control from advocating and promoting gun control, an institutional bias in the agency seems to still operate against private firearm ownership. Apparently, in the 1990s, the CDC looked at one of the most critical issues regarding the firearm debate: How often are firearms used in self-defense each year? The answer was staggering: According to the CDC’s analysis of a handful of states, Americans use guns to defend themselves, their families and their property up to 2.5 million times each year. Despite the importance of such findings, the CDC decided to keep the results hidden from the public for almost 20 years. (Read more)
Cronyism and protectionism
A court case that focuses on a Wisconsin butter-making rule is proving to be a great case study in the crony-serving nature of big government. In Wisconsin, before butter can be sold to the public, each batch must go through an “udderly” ridiculous grading system. According to Cato, “the criteria used to grade the butter are a ludicrous mad-lib of meaningless jargon not even the state’s experts understand.” The law purports to identify such flavor characteristics as “flat,” “ragged-boring,” and “utensil,” and requires great expense to get each batch “approved” for sale. The absurd grading scheme has done little to help the state churn out tasty butters — but it has done wonders to protect the state’s largest butter manufacturers from facing any legitimate form of competition. (Read more)