California’s pension woes are constantly making news and the unfunded liabilities of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) have increased 383 percent in ten years and last year CalPERS was some $100 billion short of funding its pension obligations. Taxpayers are now getting some clues about the reason for this mess. 

In 2016 CalPERS hired as CEO Marcie Frost, who had no college degree of any kind. A degree does not guarantee competence but taxpayers might expect the nation’s biggest state pension fund to demand a degree in math, economics or business administration for its chief executive officer. As it turns out, when CalPERS sought a successor for previous CEO Anne Stausboll, who argued that public employee pensions deserve special protections from cuts, CalPERS did not even list a college degree as a qualification. 

This week marks the 10^th anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the pivotal event that serves as the official starting point of the financial panic of 2008. Officials in both the George W. Bush administration and Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve did not let that particular crisis go to waste, but instead rescued Wall Street from its reckless behavior as the U.S. Treasury Department infused equity capital into major banks and the Fed began its “Quantitative Easing” programs, whereby it bought trillions of dollars worth of “toxic” mortgage-backed securities.

In the wake of Lehman’s collapse, a familiar refrain from government officials, academics, the news media, and even Hollywood served to cement the “lessons” that deregulation and greed were the main causes of the financial crisis, while bold political intervention spared Americans from another Great Depression (the last time policymakers allegedly stood back and did nothing).

When President Trump came into office, many small businesses in the United States had been laboring under burdensome conditions for a very long time. Writing at Entrepreneur magazine in 2014, Scott Shane identified the regulatory burden imposed by the U.S. government as one of the main contributors to the ongoing malaise of small business owners.

One of the best ways for Congress to help small businesses would be to reduce their regulatory burden, which is heavier now than when President Obama took office in January 2009.

This increase in regulation is both unfair and inefficient: Compliance with governmental rules and laws is a greater encumbrance on small companies than large ones, and regulation hinders small business formation, growth, and job creation.

The cost of federal regulations rose by $70 billion during the President’s first term in office, the Heritage Foundation reports. And small business has not been exempted from the rising tide. At the end of 2012, the number of federal regulations affecting small companies was 13 percent higher than at the end of 2008, Forbes reports.

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first generic version of EpiPen. EpiPens provide swift, and potentially lifesaving, treatment for those with anaphylaxis (allergic reactions requiring emergency medicine). Anaphylaxis is surprisingly common, affecting between 1.6 percent and 5.1 percent of the U.S. population.

The release of a generic alternative to EpiPen provides medical and financial relief for millions of Americans. It also comes at a critical time. As FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb remarked, “This approval means patients living with severe allergies which require constant access to life-saving epinephrine should have a lower-cost option, as well as another approved product to help protect against potential drug shortages.”

[Editor’s update: The Heartland Institute and the Independent Institute are rebutting the alarmist claims at the Global Climate Action Summit. We are broadcasting live from Independent’s Conference Center in Oakland, across the bay from the San Francisco summit. Sept. 13 coverage is here;  Sept. 14 coverage is here.]

The Global Climate Action Summit is September 12-14 in San Francisco. One purpose is to “ratchet up the ambition of national climate action plans.” Another is to “provide the confidence to governments to ‘step up’ and trigger this next level of ambition sooner rather than later.”

The late summer surprise hit of the year appears to be Crazy Rich Asians, a romantic-comedy-drama that has raked in more than $160 million at the box office in less than a month. The filmmakers and cast hope Crazy Rich Asians‘ story of an American in Singapore will challenge modern-day stereotypes of Asia and Asians in general. In some important ways, the movie succeeds, but not necessarily through the devices the producers (or director) may have intended.

As we noted last year, the cost of repairing Oroville Dam surged to $870 million and “taxpayers statewide should not be surprised if the total costs wind up well north of $1 billion.” That has now come to pass, as the cost now comes to $1.1 billion. Some review is in order. 

During heavy rains in February 2017 the concrete spillway failed, launching fears that the nation’s tallest dam might fail and forcing the evacuation of 188,000 people. Politicians said the dam’s emergency spillway worked well until it had to be used, and state officials kept design and maintenance records secret, on the grounds that they might fall into the hands of terrorists. As it turned out, they had other realities to hide. 

The massive Independent Forensic Team Report: Oroville Dam Spillway Incident blamed the failure on “a complex interaction of relatively common physical, human, organizational, and industry factors, starting with the design of the project and continuing until the incident.” The principal designer for the Oroville spillways was a post-grad student with “no prior professional experience designing spillways.” The report did not reveal the name of the unqualified person or the person who tapped him for the job. Perhaps he or she was related to some politician or government official. Neither did the report reveal what other dams or bridges the unqualified person might have designed, and how they had stood up over the years. One Department of Water Resources vet who worked on the dam said no such person existed, but the legacy is still in place. 

The city of Oroville has filed a lawsuit against the DWR for mismanagement of the dam, built 50 years ago in 1968. The repair costs have risen from $870 million to $1.1 billion and taxpayers should not be surprised if they rise still higher. DWR bosses look to the federal government but if the crisis was caused by faulty maintenance, FEMA could reject reimbursement. 

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K. Lloyd Billingsley is a Policy Fellow at the Independent Institute and a columnist at The Daily Caller.

In rallies and speeches Donald Trump proclaims that no president has ever cut so many regulations. Cass Sunstein, from 2009 to 2012 an administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, brings a different perspective to that claim. 

Under George W. Bush, he explains, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs approved about 2,500 final regulations and under Barack Obama, about 2,100. What really counts, according to Sunstein, is repeal of existing regulations and the Trump administration has only repealed “dozens.” If the true number is around 100, that accounts for “about 2 percent of the number of regulations finalized over the past 16 years.”

The number isn’t higher because, “after regulations have been on the books for a while, people get accustomed to them. Companies aren’t eager to have to make large-scale adjustments, especially if they have changed their practices to adapt to previous requirements.” 

Sunstein believes that many regulations do more good than harm, and that “in 2017 and 2018, the U.S. would also have seen a slowdown in regulatory activity under Hillary Clinton.” Even so, “Trump’s effort to push the pause button has worked—and it is undoubtedly more dramatic than what would have happened in a Democratic administration.” The real lesson, according to Sunstein, is that “for any president, it’s a lot easier to reduce the flow of new regulations than to eliminate those on the books.” 

Whatever Trump’s performance on regulations, taxpayers might note the president has failed to eliminate any federal agencies, however redundant or useless they might be. The previous administration, during a recession, launched a new federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, funded by the Federal Reserve, not Congress, and headed by a single person, presidential pick Richard Cordray. The former CFPB boss is now running for governor of Ohio. 

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K. Lloyd Billingsley is a Policy Fellow at the Independent Institute and a columnist at The Daily Caller.

President Trump recently made news when he announced that he would suspend the automatic pay increases that civilian federal government employees were set to receive in January 2019, which would be the first time since President Obama suspended automatic pay raises for U.S. government workers in 2011.

Bloomberg‘s Toluse Olorunnipa and Louis Labrecque describe how much that raise would cost U.S. taxpayer if President Trump did not act to stop it by August 31, 2018.

Had Trump not acted by Friday, federal workers would have received an automatic across-the-board pay increase of 2.1 percent and locality pay increases averaging 25.7 percent under the 1990 Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act, according to the letter.

To get a sense of the cost of the automatic pay raise that was to take effect, we need to know two things: (1) how many civilian federal government employees are on Uncle Sam’s payroll, and (2) how much money they make. Here, we know that the U.S. government has over 2 million employees on its civilian payroll, while an April 2017 Congressional Budget Office report that compared the compensation of federal government and private sector workers provides their average annual compensation.

The data revolution is a trend that no organization or enterprise can afford to ignore. Every minute Google conducts nearly 4 million searches, YouTube plays over 4 million videos, Twitter adds almost 500,000 new tweets, and Americans use over 3 million gigabytes of internet data. While business decision-makers use the deluge of data sets to transform the for-profit world, nonprofit leaders can take advantage of big data analytics to further their charitable missions.

Nonprofits can use big data analytics to accomplish two general objectives. The first is to better predict patterns of donor behavior. Some nonprofit institutions of higher education, for example, have already reaped huge rewards in fundraising through predictive analytics. Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., doubled its donation revenue in a single year by partnering with QualPro, a consulting firm that has used data-driven analysis to help clients improve their donor marketing strategies.

The University of South Dakota has also used big data analytics to strengthen its fundraising. The school partnered with the data-consulting service Target Analytics to identify likely donors based on various characteristics and behavior patterns. By 2016, the administration’s $15,000 investment in analytics had returned $61 million in contributions.