A Pattern of Boondoggling VERONIQUE de RUGY, an economist for the Mercatus Center, famously said that if you miss your budget estimates 20 percent of the time you are an incompetent but if you miss them 80 percent of the time you are a liar. What would be said about the cost of a project in my city that in two years nearly doubled before they set the first brick? Some would say that the mayor…

By Mark Franke “I don’t do this for the money. I do it for the late-night phone calls.” — a Monroeville councilman Nearly everyone I know is disgusted with the current state of our national government. Many also feel the same way about our Indiana state government, but then I tend to associate with others of like mind so this is hardly a representative sample for statistical purposes. Still, it is what I hear often enough…

by Leo Morris When the coal started running low at the mine my father worked in, he considered several options. The one he decided on was to relocate from Kentucky to Fort Wayne, which had two major advantages. It was large enough to have plenty of employment opportunities not involving coal mines, and his sister and her husband already lived here and could help his family navigate the new environment. Not once did he think…

Stopping and Frisking Saves Lives AS COMPLICATED as democracy is, you can clearly see it working in Marion County. You can tell by the high murder rate. Marion voters, the reasons for which they are quite proud, have decided to elect a mayor and prosecuting attorney who demonstrate their social compassion by abiding homicide. Not everywhere, of course. There are two places in Marion County — that place and the other place. The murders are…

By Mark Franke One trend at the national level is the proliferation of law judges in the federal agencies. They can streamline adjudication of legitimate citizen and taxpayer issues so there is some value added. The problem is that often these cases involve fines and penalties imposed by the agency whose hearing officer is ruling on its appropriateness. Even worse, there is often no effective appeal from these administrative decisions to the courts. These officials…

Yes, You Live in Corruption “Nothing happens until the right people own the land.”— anonymous THE MOST BASIC economic statistic is how many are coming and how many are going. So how do you explain that Indiana is now second only to Illinois in the number of people skedaddling. The national moving company Atlas says that 59 percent of its Indiana customers are leaving. As with everything these days, there are two explanations. The economic-development experts…

by Leo Morris I have always been proud to be a Hoosier, proclaiming it boldly even to coastal snobs who almost think of it as a confession of mental deficiency. I was not born in Indiana, but I was raised enough here to have adopted its values as my own – hard work, thrift, loyalty, integrity. Consider me a backward rube if you must, but I wear this state’s nickname as a badge of honor.…

By Mark Franke Is This the Government We Deserve? “You get the government you deserve.” Thomas Jefferson I don’t have a Ph.D. in political science but one is hardly needed to realize something is seriously wrong with the current state of our government. It isn’t that the President commits oral gaffe after gaffe or that the House Republicans resolved to play family feud in public. These are only symptoms, a list which is too long…

By Richard McGowan, Ph.D. A person once wrote, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.” Besides strong socialists, who would agree with that statement? Despite his statements about millionaires and billionaires, Bernie Sanders would not likely agree to the abolition of private property. He himself is a millionaire, with a net worth of approximately 2.5 million dollars. In his defense, he stated “I wrote a…

It’s a Dunder-Mifflin World “There is beauty in ordinary things; isn’t that kind of the point?” — Pam in the last line of “The Office.” OVERCAST, FRIGID JANUARY is a good month for reruns and deep thoughts, or at least as deep as one’s thinking mechanism allows. Here’s one: Maybe the politicians aren’t to blame; maybe this is our own darn fault. The thought accompanies a fear that we are trapped in a Dunder-Mifflin world, mimicking a…