Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
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Recently, President Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to delay implementation of a new rule that further reduces industrial ozone emissions —smog — under the Clean Air Act (CAA). The announcement came on the same day new employment figures showed the economy had created no new jobs in August. With unemployment stuck above 9 percent and the economy teetering on the brink of a double-dip recession, President Obama decided the suggested benefits of the new rul...
Looking at the opinion polls, it’s easy to be depressed these days. Three out of four likely voters say America’s on the wrong track, consumer confidence has tanked, investors are sitting on the sidelines and job growth has stalled. In short, this is not a recipe for optimism. In his most recent survey, Seattle pollster Stu Elway found that voter confidence has sunk to an all-time low, the worst he’s seen in 20 years. Elway writes: “Economic recovery is a little like the fiv...
President Obama and the newly appointed Congressional federal debt reduction committee will need to look under every rock to find ways to save money and do things differently. Now, they're getting some help from the private sector. In June, the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded a four-year $77 million contract to Northrop Grumman to develop a detection system capable of stopping fraud before it happens. Based on systems used in the private sector to...
People don’t appreciate what they have until they lose it. For example, if your water line breaks and you go without showers for a couple of days, you have a whole new appreciation for the water company. Too often, Americans focus on what we don’t have, and we take the simple things in life for granted. But the freedoms and standard of living we’ve always known are not guaranteed. Just look at what has happened in other places around the world. For example, today Gdansk and G...
You may have missed it, but amidst the global economic turmoil, riots in London and our volatile stock market, there is some good news. Boeing has completed flight tests on its long-delayed 787 Dreamliner and has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to certify the plane for production. The company is hoping to earn FAA approval in time to start delivering planes in September. Despite the delays, the 787 remains a major source of future income for Boeing. Boeing...
At the same time President Obama and Congress were locked in combat over raising the nation’s debt ceiling, leaders of state manufacturing associations from across America were meeting right here in Washington. Despite the 3,000-mile distance, our futures — and their problems — are intertwined. As the debt ceiling debate raged, our nation’s debt climbed to $14.3 trillion, the U.S. Treasury’s cash on hand dwindled to $74 billion and America teetered on the brink of insolvency....
Americans live in an idealistic world where, no matter what happens, we’ll still be able to go home at night and switch on the lights or pull into a filling station and gas up the family SUV. Most folks — including many elected officials — don’t connect the dots. They somehow believe there are no consequences to killing a small biomass project in Vancouver, stopping a wind farm development because it spoils their view, taking a coal-fired plant off line, or opposing a natural...
Lost in the news over the economic crisis in Europe and the debt ceiling debate in the United States was the unceremonious end of NASA’s space shuttle program. When Atlantis touched down in Florida just before dawn on July 21, there were no marching bands or boastful speeches, and the small crowds at the Kennedy and Johnson space centers were composed mainly of NASA workers and their families. In fact, the ending of the shuttle program barely merited a mention on the n...
Desperate times too often result in bad choices. Translated, that means when taxes don’t match state spending, governors and lawmakers rob dedicated accounts. Dedicated accounts were established to tax people or employers for a specific purpose and only use that money to fund that program. In essence, they promise not to siphon it off to balance the general fund budget. However, robbing Peter to pay Paul has become common practice in Olympia. For example, in 2009, W...
Imagine coming home from work, tossing your keys on the hall table and flipping on the light switch. Nothing happens. You sigh, remembering that this is the night your neighborhood is scheduled for a rolling brownout. Even with electricity at 25 cents a kilowatt hour, there’s not enough power on the grid to supply the homes, hospitals, factories and office buildings in your state. New laws limit the amount of electricity you can use, and homes are equipped with utility s...
My dad used to say, “Public officials should never borrow money, except in an emergency, like a war.” As the mayor of a small town in Montana, he put that principle into practice. Buying a new dump truck was not an emergency. If the city didn’t have the money to buy it, the answer was no. Even if state or federal funds were available to make the down payment, if the city couldn’t come up with the rest of the money, the answer was still no. Most vendors feel the same way whe...
Later this month, state legislators will begin discussions about designing and implementing a health-care exchange. If experience is a guide — and it is — Washington lawmakers should tread very carefully because recent events have shown how perilous such efforts can be. State health-care exchanges, authorized under the federal health-reform law, were originally characterized as virtual open-air markets where health-insurance providers would compete side-by-side so con...
In 1975, as America was preparing to celebrate its bicentennial, Poland was a suppressed Soviet satellite state. The Polish people were impoverished, had no right to free speech and if you wanted a job, you had to play ball with Communist Party bosses. Poland was a bleak land that had never recovered from World War II. That same year, more than 5,000 miles away, the Business Week program began at Central Washington University as a way for high school students to experience...
Partisan wrangling in Congress over the federal deficit and government spending has created gridlock. Not much else is getting done. Into that void have stepped federal bureaucrats who are circumventing Congress to implement sweeping policy changes. With President Obama’s legislative initiatives stalled in Congress, his appointed agency directors are finding ways to implement his programs without congressional approval. These aren’t penny-ante changes – some programs carry tri...
Just as thousands of college graduates are walking across the stage to receive their diplomas, the U.S. Department of Labor announced frail May jobs figures. Unemployment ratcheted up a notch to 9.1 percent and the U.S. economy added just 54,000 jobs last month — barely one-third of the 150,000 needed each month to return our nation to prosperity. Even more troubling, economists think the true national unemployment numbers may be much higher. That’s because the government doe...
We’ve all heard the stories. An elderly woman is awarded $2.7 million after spilling McDonald’s coffee in her lap. A Washington, D.C. judge sues a local dry cleaner for $54 million for losing his pants. A neighbor successfully sues two teenage girls handing out free cookies, claiming they triggered an anxiety attack when they knocked on her door. These stories make the headlines, but each year tens of thousands of anonymous lawsuits choke our court systems — and we all pay t...
The U.S. is being inundated with historic floods from Minnesota to Louisiana as a massive amount of water from heavy rainfall and snowmelt races down the Mississippi River. With U.S. taxpayers shouldering the majority of the claims through the National Flood Insurance Program, Bloomberg reports the Mississippi’s surge could result in the highest flooding losses since the $16 billion in claims following Hurricane Katrina. Without our network of dams on the lower Columbia and S...
By 2025, the TransAlta energy facility in Centralia must replace coal with natural gas to generate electricity, but Washington has no gas to offer. Fortunately, we have neighbors with an abundance of gas — natural gas, that is — to ship to us. In Washington, three-quarters of our electricity comes from hydropower. But 14 percent of it comes from coal burned at the TransAlta facility, which employs 600 people in good family-wage jobs and provides heat and light for 1.23 mil...
State lawmakers in Olympia received a much-needed boost recently in the form of $320 million in new tax revenue, the result of a new tax amnesty program. The amnesty, first proposed in 2009 by State Auditor Brian Sonntag, was vigorously championed by the Association of Washington Business as a way to settle disputed tax assessments. To use a cliché, the tax amnesty program is a win-win. State and local governments gained vital tax revenue, and taxpayers, many of whom are...
One of the major provisions in the federal health reform law calls on states to establish health insurance exchanges by 2014. These exchanges were envisioned as virtual “open air markets,” managed by new state agencies, where consumers could compare insurance offerings and choose the best health coverage at the best price. Good idea. But early indications are that states are using the exchanges to create their own vision of health-care reform, including everything from cro...
As the price of gas passes $4 on its way to $5 a gallon, the finger pointing in Washington, D.C. has reached a frenzy as politicians rush to place blame. “Wall Street profiteers!” “Speculators!” “Big Oil!” As if on cue, the administration has launched another investigation into charges that speculators are manipulating oil prices – a perennial response of elected officials when gas prices stir anger among the electorate. Previous investigations have found no conspiracies....
During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama promised organized labor that he would support their agenda. Having failed to get labor’s priorities through Congress, the Obama administration is seeking to achieve the same goal through regulation. For example, the president campaigned on passing card check, a union-backed measure that eliminates the secret ballot in union organizing elections. Inappropriately dubbed the “Employee Free Choice Act,” card check actu...
In Illinois, the workers’ comp system is so out-of-control that Democratic state Rep. John Bradley introduced legislation to abolish it and put workers’ compensation cases in the state’s circuit courts. Workers’ comp was established nearly a century ago as a no-fault insurance system so workers and employers would not have to go to court. However, without major reforms, it is certain to collapse because of rapidly escalating costs and premiums charged to employers. In Springf...
Just over a year ago when President Obama, then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., rammed Obamacare through Congress, no one really knew what was in the 2,700 pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). But small business soon learned that it wasn’t so affordable. For example, the law includes a provision that requires all businesses to file a 1099 form to the Internal Revenue Service for p...
