Ed choice event
Join us after work on May 10th for a “School Choice Happy Hour!” The event will be held in Summerlin, at Honey Salt restaurant, at 5:30 pm. Tim Keller, of the Institute for Justice will be the evening’s keynote speaker. Tim played a critical role in defending Nevada’s educational choice options, and will be discussing what can be done to expand choice in the Silver State in the year ahead. (View the details of the event and RSVP here)
Benefits of tax reform
Workers and businesses are still seeing the benefits of last year’s GOP tax reform. McDonald’s recently announced that, thanks to the lower corporate tax rates, they will be able to expand and improve their popular tuition-assistance program for employees. Promising $150 million to the program, McDonald’s officials said the amount employees can receive toward tuition assistance will roughly triple under the new framework. Furthermore, the executives explained that savings from the tax reform will allow the fast food company to dramatically lower the eligibility requirements for the program — resulting in 400,000 employees being eligible to take advantage of the program. (Watch the video here)
Fiscal and taxes
Most people were aware that tax day was this week. But fewer people seem to know that there was another important tax-related day this week: Tax Freedom Day. Tax Freedom Day, which fell on April 19th this year, represents the day when Americans as a whole have earned enough money to pay their cumulative tax bill for the year. In other words, Americans had to work over 100 days to earn the amount of money they will owe in taxes to their governments in 2018. To put this into perspective, Americans pay more on taxes than they do on food, clothing and housing combined. (Read more)
Property rights
Little Pink House is an amazing true story about a lone homeowner in New London, Connecticut, who stood up against a crony government that wanted to bulldoze her home under the guise of promoting “economic development.” (Tickets are still available for the showing in Las Vegas, Nevada. Click here to learn more.) The film stars some well-accomplished actors, including Academy Award Nominee Catherine Keener. Yet one would be forgiven for thinking the movie might suffer from little attention at the box office since its budget was a mere $5 million and official advertising was sparse. In truth, however, audiences seem eager to learn about this real-life struggle against a crony-oriented and abusive government. In New London, the official premiere drew so much attention, people were turned away due to lack of seating. According to some who attended, moviegoers were so moved by the tale, the theater broke out into applause when the credits began rolling. (Read more here)
Free markets
If you listen to its political critics, Amazon is killing “mom and pop” businesses — undercutting their prices and driving them into bankruptcy — or so the argument goes. The truth is, however, that these arguments aren’t new. Similar complaints have been made about innovative retailers for over 100 years. In the 1990s, everyone worried about Wal-Mart. In the 1920s, the target was Woolworth. In the 1900s, it was Sears. So what is it about disruptive companies like Amazon that has had people worried over and over again? (Read more)
California
What do you think of California? What would you think about three Californias? A Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tim Draper, has long discussed the possibility of breaking the state into multiple new states. His latest plan — to break the state into three states — has collected 600,000 signatures. That’s enough to place the proposal on the ballot. So, what does that mean for California, and the rest of the country? (Read more)
Continuing series on special education
The final part of Fixing Special Ed, NPRI Senior VP Steve Miller’s in-depth series on special education in Nevada, is now available on Nevada Journal. (Click here to read more) Even more exciting, however, is the fact that the entire series, with some new material, is now available as an e-book for Kindle! (Click here to download a copy)
