David Montgomery left South Dakota last December for a better job in the Twin Cities. He now gets to report on Gallup numbers showing Minnesota's better rate of uninsured people: At the beginning of 2014, just 9.5 percent of Minnesotans…
Posts published in “national”
Oh look: South Dakota's #2... in measles! Asterisk our #2: four of the cases mapped around Mitchell are folks from other states inflating our numbers. I heard Senator Rand Paul on NPR yesterday saying he's not against vaccinations but that…
Various observers have raised concerns that South Dakota's use of the EB-5 visa investment program may have opened our doors to Chinese spies and mafia. Now, two years after Iowa Senator Charles Grassley started beating the drum about the possible…
Need help figuring out your 2014 federal tax return? Don't count on the Internal Revenue Service. The National Taxpayer Advocate's latest report to Congress says the IRS lacks the staff and funding to serve taxpayers: The IRS will be able…
A Twitter friend alerts me to this alarming statistic: 51% of public school students were eligible for federal assistance in paying for lunch in the 2012–2013 school year. Here's the Washington Post's map of the percentage of public school kids…
The Washington Post editorial board says opponents and supporters of the Keystone XL pipeline are all exaggerating: Despite what you might have heard, the pipeline wouldn’t kill the planet, nor would it supercharge the economy. You don’t have to take…
A week ago I provoked some discussion with a post on a 1970s experiment in providing a guaranteed minimum income to a rural community in Manitoba. I put up some back-of-the-envelope numbers that showed South Dakota could redirect half of…
I'm reading up on the Mid-American States Purchasing Economy Survey Report, a survey of supply managers in nine states conducted monthly by Dr. Ernie Goss and associates at Creighton University's Heider College of Business. Our local press like to blurb…