The fate of GM, Chrysler and Ford hang in the balance, with widely varying sentiments regarding what can be done, if anything. Both a bailout or a bankruptcy present a set of opportunities as well as negative consequences. If a bailout were structured to include in its terms some of the restructuring benefits that otherwise could [...]

It is difficult to put both sides of any initiative into a few words and capture all the nuances, but here are some observations for voters to consider as we go into the last days before the election.  The points made here are based on very recent conversations with people intimately involved with the campaigns both for and [...]

It is always interesting to read the ballot in California when there are a dozen or more citizen’s initiatives.  Californians, despite being social liberals, still tend to vote against any new taxes of any sort.  During the internet boom and the housing boom there was so much revenue flowing into the state and local governments it [...]

If you think about the mission of enterprise resource planning software, in some ways it’s surprising the modules for environmental health and safety compliance weren’t integrated sooner.  It is also interesting that at the same time as the major ERP vendors - Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, and others - were systematically integrating the major business [...]

We have been warning readers about the pension crisis for a few years now.  In a nutshell, the problem is the following:  California public employee unions - which are virtually unregulated despite the fact they operate in the uncompetitive public sector - have pretty much taken over California’s state and local governments. In recent years [...]

The opponents of California’s ballot Proposition 7 (read full text of Prop 7) claim it will “cost consumers and taxpayers hundreds of millions per year in higher electric rates - a $300 increase per household per year.”  It is hard to get access to the calculations behind these estimates, so we have attempted to come up [...]

America’s credit crisis should come as no surprise to anyone whose been paying attention.  We discussed this about a year ago in our post “Inflation vs. Deflation,” and if you read that post, you will see links to discussions we’ve had on this topic that go back as far as 1998.  Because this has been brewing [...]