Category: Indiana Writers Group

Members: The author is a former legislator and councilman now an instructor at the Keith Busse School of Business and Entrepreneurship at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne. This is adapted from testimony he presented this week to the Fort Wayne City Council, the first in the state to take up the new option…

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE government-can-work-magic stories — a parks department repurposes an old municipal dump into a new golf course. Shazam! Happy citizens playing cheap golf, manicured greens and fairways instead of smelly sludge and trash. The problem, government being government, is that a new municipal golf course is run, well, like an old…

by Andrea Neal Chief Justice Earl Warren gets most of the credit, and rightly so, for the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregated schools. But were it not for a Hoosier — Justice Sherman Minton of Floyd County — the Brown case would not have even been before…

“In an all-Navy message published Tuesday, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Robert Burke said a three-pronged training approach will equip senior leaders and rank-and-file personnel for the changes (to open transgender service).” — military.com, Sept. 16, 2016 HAVING BREAKFAST one Sunday off U.S. 931 in Kokomo, reading about NFL players protesting Western Civilization, I…

by Martina Webster We should educate people on the tax-rate formula every chance we get. The more who understand the concept, the better the dialog on government spending. For starters, could giving up a tax exemption lower your taxes? Consider that it is time for the Legislature to designate something other than the Homestead Credit…

by Andrea Neal Though many might be tempted to confer the honor on Benjamin Harrison, Wendell L. Willkie is the only native Hoosier ever nominated for president by a major political party. Harrison was from North Bend, Ohio. Born and raised in Elwood, Willkie was the Republican standard bearer in 1940, securing the nomination on…

by Tom Huston A description of Donald Trump’s child-care plan in the Weekly Standard is a perfect example of why I believe so much of what passes for conservative thinking these days is totally irrelevant to the real world. Trump’s tax deduction for child-care costs would be available to a taxpayer with taxable income of…

by James E. McClure, Ph.D., and T. Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. In a 2011 article, “Too Many Rhinestones,” Professors T. Norman Van Cott and the late Clarence Deitsch examined Ball State University’s (BSU) grade-inflation problem. After comparing grade distributions and grade-point averages (GPAs) from fall 1990 and fall 2009 in principles-level courses, they found that…

The author is an attorney with a national practice specializing in disparity studies, called as an expert witness in challenges to racial preferences in public contracting. He wrote this for the foundation based on work being commissioned by a client group of contractors. Contact him at jcharlessullivan@yahoo.com. The foundation’s white papers are intended to make…

by Andrea Neal In the segregated world of the 20th century, a street called Indiana Avenue came to symbolize the identity and aspirations of Indianapolis’s black citizens. “It was the heart and soul of the African-American community,” says David Leander Williams, author of “Indianapolis Jazz.” From the late 1800s, “the Avenue” offered a vibrant residential,…