Month: October 2008
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How a Sub-prime Lender Influences Kansas Energy and Environment Policy
In an American Thinker article titled How allies of George Soros helped bring down Wachovia Bank, you can read about the business activities of Herbert and Marion Sandler: Herbert and Marion Sandler, a New York lawyer and Wall Street analyst respectively, bought a small California thrift in 1963 and built it into GDW [Golden West…
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Still more Kansas National Education Association candidate questions
The “Kansas Political Action Committee,” a group associated with the Kansas National Education Association (KNEA, the teachers union) has a questionnaire it asks candidates for the Kansas legislature to complete. After reading a few of these questions, it became clear to me that the questions are formulated to advance the interests of the teachers union…
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Wichita School Bond: Information Request
In support of the proposed Wichita school bond issue, USD 259 officials and their supporting campaign group make a lot of claims. Unfortunately, Wichita news outlets, for whatever reason, don’t spend a lot of time investigating these claims. It’s left to citizens to make inquiries. So I do. Here’s one sent to Wendy Johnson, Division…
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Should a Beat Journalist be a Layman?
Keeping TIFs from a public tiff by Wichita Eagle business reporter Bill Wilson on the Eagle’s Business Casual blog contains some comments that are troubling to me. In these comments, reporter Wilson wrote this: “Instead, a TIF, to this layman, actually is a government bet on the success of a development.” (emphasis added) Now I…
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Our problem is the manager of our money
Think of it: Nothing is more vital to capitalism than capital, the financial seed corn dedicated to next year’s crop. Yet we, believers in free markets, allow the price of capital, i.e., the interest rate on loanable funds, to be fixed by a central committee in accordance with government objectives. We might as well resurrect…