taxpayer-funded public works project in a poor country where thousands of men with shovels were moving dirt one spadeful at a time. … more

Existing, home-grown restaurant owners in the area — who pay their taxes in full and get no special privileges from the government — are no doubt relieved that they won't have to compete with a politically favored and subsidized outsider. … more

Mark Adler, a lobbyist for the Michigan Production Alliance, and Carrie Jones, the director of the Michigan Film Office, defended the state's film subsidy program in a Senate Finance Committee meeting today. To do so they employed a long-recognized economic fallacy, the "Broken Window" theory, which only considers economic activity that is "seen" while ignoring unseen economic costs. … more

A rather blistering May 16Over time, voter suppression as political praxis has produced variously sophisticated means of keeping African Americans and others away from exercising the franchise. Even gerrymandering—the redrawing of electoral districts to produce an outcome favoring one political party and a quite ordinary way of cooking the vote—today seems passé. This notion can probably be proven by the recent victory of untried Democrat Conor Lamb over incumbent Republican Rick Saccone for a U.S. House seat in Pennsylvania’s 18th District in a special election in March of this year—a contest with electoral boundaries more reasonably drawn by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court, thus undoing even by a small margin Saccone’s incumbency.1 In another special election in November 2017, where gerrymandering was unnecessary in reliably crimson Alabama, for example, Doug Jones, the