I had an interesting exchange with a reporter. He was writing a story about the prospects of government expansion in reaction to the “real estate catastrophe” and hepatitis scare.
The real estate part of our conversation led to my not explaining very well my belief that part of our economic woes is caused by government - [...]

For the past six months, the big economic news in Nevada has been the downturn in the non-gaming economy. Home sales are down, and sales of home appliances and improvements are down too. This has been the biggest factor in our government tax revenue not coming in as high as we’d hoped.
The good news throughout [...]

Here’s a must-read paper published by Harvard.
The last quarter century has witnessed remarkable progress of mankind. The world’s per capita inflation-adjusted income rose from $5400 in 1980 to $8500 in 2005.Schooling and life expectancy grew rapidly, while infant mortality and poverty fell just asfast. Compared to 1980, many more countries in the world are democratic [...]

Here’s the December 2007 Nevada Economy In Brief.
Highlights:

At the beginning of the year, Government represented 12.02% of Nevada’s jobs.
Although it is just a small portion of overall jobs, it provided 69% of the new jobs created during 2007.
Nevada added 5,800 government jobs and 2,600 private-sector jobs during 2007.
Statewide, government jobs paid the highest average wages, [...]

My family and I spent the weekend up in Ely, checking out the most cool “Fire & Ice Festival” at Cave Lake State Park. It’s ice and snow sculptures for three days, followed by a big fireworks show at the park on Sunday night. It was awesome.
I got home to learn that a bi-partisan group [...]

Here’s the story, from CNN…
Rite Aid Corp., the nation’s third-largest drugstore chain, said Friday it will close 28 unprofitable stores in the Las Vegas area to focus on its core markets.
Some of the stores were previously part of the Thrifty PayLess chain that Rite Aid acquired in 1997. The company has not opened a new [...]

That’s what our government reported a week or so back.
Clark County’s two millionth resident simply showed up sometime in the last three months, and no one — not even the milestone newcomer — noticed the difference.
However, a sidebar for the story revealed the methodology that government uses to forecast population:
The county’s annual population estimate is [...]