Month: March 2004

Earlier this month, Portland was designated by Inc. magazine as the eighth worst city to do business in. Local politicians, long accustomed to fawning reviews by east coast media outlets, were stunned by this rebuke. Don Mazziotti, director of the Portland Development Commission, dismissed the ranking by saying, “If you use a screwy methodology, you get screwy results.”

Unfortunately for Portland, Inc. didn’t use (more…)

Federal job retraining programs ended up helping only 44 percent of the Oregonians who enrolled. Employment trends are difficult for anyone, let alone a federal bureaucracy, to predict. Thus, haphazardly throwing training at Oregon’s unemployment problem is a prescription to waste billions of dollars.

A few years ago, technology companies provided the (more…)

While the D.C. school system spends more per pupil than most US cities, its student test scores are the lowest in the country. Recently, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige praised a new federal voucher law granting up to $7,500 to low-income children in the District of Columbia to attend private schools.

Research shows that school choice can (more…)

Oregonians are busy debating whether the state should approve same-sex marriages. The better question would be, “Why is the state involved in marriage at all?”

As the government is concerned, marriage is primarily a contract between two adults. There’s no inherent reason why the state should regulate the nature of the transaction. If the state’s role were to simply (more…)

Paul Allen owns the Portland Trail Blazers and has privately funded the team for years. Allen’s Oregon Arena Corp. also owns the Rose Garden where the Blazers play. This largely privately funded arena just filed for bankruptcy. The important lesson to learn: Let private people risk private money when they bring Major League Baseball to Oregon.

A couple years ago, the City of Portland spent (more…)