New Technologies, Not Paris Climate Agreement, Will Do the Job

Wind and solar simply aren’t working, and these inefficient and unreliable technologies are a key reason the Paris Climate Accord is a dismal failure. The article below is a sobering piece that sheds light on how the proposed “solutions” to carbon dioxide emissions have been expensive failures. The article below was originally published in The Financial Times. Since climate change began to gain political traction in 1990, very little has been achieved. The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere has kept going up. Lots of money has been spent, vested interests have profited, but the reality is that we remain well...

Roseville Whiffs on Liquor License for New $3 Million Golf Clubhouse

Municipal golf courses are notorious money losers for the taxpayers of most local governments that get into the game. Just four of 35 municipal courses named in the Minnesota State Auditor’s most recent available report on city finances managed not to run an operating loss in 2016. In fact, more golf courses have closed than have opened across the country every year since 2006. This year, the City of West St. Paul shut down the 9-hole Thompson Oaks municipal “executive” track after years of losing seasons. Nevertheless, the Twin Cities suburb of Roseville recently doubled down on its 9-hole course,...

Income tax hikes didn’t close Minnesota’s budget deficit

Minnesota's Individual Income Tax revenues started rising in 2011, two years before the state's hike in the top rate of income tax. If Illinois' policymakers are considering similar tax hikes to close their own deficits, they ought to think again.

AMERICAN EXPERIMENT BOOK SHELF

Becoming an American: how our Elite has Cheapened Citizenship

My friend from Egypt came to our country many years ago in hopes of being a citizen. He loves America, loves the West and all it stands for: freedom and prosperity. He thinks our lax approach to immigration betrays a terrible naiveté and a dangerous lack of care for preserving American culture, the culture that attracted him to move here. He did not come all the way from Egypt to live in a chaotic, socialist nation. He could have gone many places around the globe, or just stayed in Egypt, for that.

Assessing the Fourth “National Assessment” of Climate Change

Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute is brilliant on the climate change issue. If you are interested in this topic and haven’t read his book, Lukewarming, I highly suggest you pick it up. Michaels recently wrote a blog about the highly publicized, but little scrutinized Climate Assessment that has been making headlines here in Minnesota. The blog post is below and he provides links to his extensive comments. The 1990 Global Change Research Act requires quadrennial  “Assessments” of the effects of global climate change on the U.S. The first was published in 2000, the second in 2009 (the G.W. Bush Administration...

University of Minnesota Proposes Extra Science Tax

The University of Minnesota has proposed a $1,000 per semester surcharge for new undergraduate students in the College of Science and Engineering, supposedly to enable the high-demand school to expand. The charge also would apply to College of Liberal Arts students majoring in certain science fields. No wonder more and more people are seeking trades instead of a university higher education. The science surcharge would cost incoming engineering students an additional $8,000 over the course of a four year program, which represents a 14.5 percent increase over normal tuition for that time period. The university defended the science tax, by stating...

Wisconsin Sports Stadiums Cleaner Than Minnesota’s

“ESPN’s Outside The Lines published an exhaustive report on food safety at every major North American sports venue. None of the four Twin Cities sports venues on the list fared well,” wrote the Star Tribune. None of the four Twin Cities sports venues on the list fared well. The worst of the bunch, per OTL’s reporting and methodology, was U.S. Bank Stadium — home of the Vikings, which opened in 2016. High-level violations were found at nearly 60 percent of inspection points, ranking U.S. Bank Stadium 90th out of the 107 venues. In contrast, the facilities in Wisconsin fared much...