Amtrak Launches New Effort to Revive Failed Passenger Line to Duluth

Amtrak’s operating loss for 2018 came in at $168 million–and they’re proud of it. Never mind that the passenger line would be even more in the red if the cost of depreciation and other expenses were included. Yet it’s the lowest operating loss ever since the inception of the taxpayer-subsidized rail line in 1972, cause for celebration in their world. All told, it was “the best performance in Amtrak’s history,” Chief Executive Officer Richard Anderson said in an interview. With the bar set low, it should be no surprise that Amtrak officials want to revive another money-losing passenger rail line that...

Minnesota’s economic news, w/e 2/15/19

A round-up of the last week’s economic news stories in Minnesota.

Green New Delusion Would Require Lots of Mining, But Will Walz Allow it in MN?

The Green New Deal (GND) has become the talk of the down despite the fact that Ernie Moniz, the head of the Department of Energy under the Obama administration, has called the deal impractical. However, renewable energy advocates are pressuring lawmakers in St. Paul to push ahead with their own GND for Minnesota, but the question remains, where will the copper, nickel, cobalt, and manganese come from? An article from Geologyforinvestors.com suggests there will be as many as 125 million electric cars on the road within the next decade, which may be overly optimistic, but we’ll see. The more important...

AMERICAN EXPERIMENT BOOK SHELF

What Elizabeth Warren Could Have Taught Marco Defunis

As you read the blog below, keep in mind how Sen. Elizabeth Warren declared herself to be an American Indian when she thought Harvard Law School would thereby afford her extra consideration, perhaps even points. The first big affirmative action case in higher education to reach the U.S. Supreme Court was not the famous Bakke case in 1978 but the less-well-known Defunis case in 1974.  For those who don’t recall it (or somehow didn’t write a dissertation about affirmative action in the academy in 1980), Marco Defunis’s application for admission to the University of Washington law school was originally rejected. ...

The same people who want ‘the rich’ to pay for everything also want to tax them out of existence. How will that work?

If 'the rich' are going to pay for everything then somebody had better be rich.

Is career and technical education just enjoying its 15 minutes of fame?

An American Enterprise Institute report examines the heightened interest in career and technical education and its long-running notability compared to other education reform efforts such as No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and the Obama-era push to overhaul teacher evaluation.

Tapping Into Greater Minnesota’s Can-Do Attitude

This column by American Experiment Chairman Ron Eibensteiner appeared in the Grand Rapids Herald Review. All the political talk about “Two Minnesotas” in this past campaign season inspired me to think long and hard about what exactly that means—and what we at the Center can do about it. To me, the first Minnesota consists of a political aristocracy, mostly urban, totally liberal, a political nobility composed of unionists, academics, social engineers and media whose attitude about governance can be summed up in three words: “We know better. Forget the real-world costs of coping with our lofty policies.” The other Minnesota...