Free Republic

Teacher pensions are a huge and growing crisis waiting to explode without major reforms, warns a new report released Tuesday by an educational think tank.“Do the math on teacher pensions and it just doesn’t add up,” argues the National Council on Teacher Quality in its report, Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions. Total unfunded teacher pension liabilities in 2014 were a whopping $499 billion dollars, the group found. That amount is surging rapidly; in 2012, the total was just $394 billion, meaning that pension debt is growing by over $50 billion a year.Some states are in a particularly huge hole....

Freedom Outpost has previously reported on the fact that gun sales represent at least one booming sector of the American economy since the re-election of Barak Obama. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to interpret that piece of data in terms of sociology: What must people be thinking? That’s a legitimate question, and it’s easy to think of an answer. Horror icon, Stephen King, has a theory that the same sort of “weather vane” indication of the public mood can be discerned from the popularity, or lack thereof, of current scary movies. In his nonfiction book about creating horror fiction, Danse...

The Obama administration announced with little fanfare Thanksgiving eve plans to lock up nine million acres of land for the endangered Northern Spotted Owl. The plan would double the amount of public forest lands proposed by the Bush administration for the owl’s habitat in Oregon, Washington and Northern California, and is expected to severely limit commercial activities like logging. Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he is concerned the plan will cost taxpayers millions of dollars. “Expanding the Northern Spotted Owl’s critical habitat will further endanger the timber industry, the thousands of jobs that...