State & Local Government eJournal最新文献_第4页

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2016-02-01 DOI: 10.1111/pbaf.12081

S. Kasdin

引用次数: 1

Building Better Budgets: Canada's Cities Should Clean Up Their Financial Reporting 建立更好的预算:加拿大的城市应该清理他们的财务报告

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-11-18 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2695186

Benjamin Dachis, W. Robson

{"title":"Building Better Budgets: Canada's Cities Should Clean Up Their Financial Reporting","authors":"Benjamin Dachis, W. Robson","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2695186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2695186","url":null,"abstract":"In nearly all Canada’s major cities, what should be a simple exercise – comparing the spending voted by city council in its annual budget with the actual spending reported at year-end – will baffle any but the most expert reader. While most of Canada’s federal and provincial governments now present their budgets on the same basis as their financial reports, municipal governments typically do not. As a result, judging whether a city over- or under-shot its budget targets, and by how much – which should be a simple matter of comparing headline numbers – is not possible for a typical councillor, taxpayer or citizen. The critical common element is that most cities use an antiquated form of budgeting. Most of Canada’s senior governments, when preparing budgets and end-of-year reports, use modern accounting methods that record the cost of long-lived assets such as buildings and infrastructure as those assets deliver their services. Municipal budgets, by contrast, budget capital on a cash basis, exaggerating projects’ up-front costs and understating them later on expenses. Largely for this reason, no major city in Canada offers a clear budget presentation, and none earns an “A” in our report card on budgeting practices. Among the cities that earn the worst grades for baffling budget presentations are Edmonton, Winnipeg, Windsor, Toronto, Vaughan and Ontario’s Durham Region. This study also shows how a reasonably intelligent but time-constrained non-expert user – a councillor or taxpayer – might understand the differences between budgeted and actual spending in Canada’s major cities. The gaps are enormous – and indicate that opaque budgeting is a major obstacle to fiscal accountability at the municipal level. Importantly, these cities’ end-of-year financial reports, which use accounting similar to that used by senior governments, show a cumulative surplus of $41 billion since 2008. Their total surplus was $6 billion in 2014 alone. This record suggests that cash budgeting has led cities to over-charge today’s taxpayers for long-lived capital projects. In Ontario, Vaughan, Halton Region, and Markham stand out in this respect; among major Western Canadian cities, Calgary, Saskatoon and Surrey, B.C. also appear not to be spreading the costs of capital over time as fairly as they could. Changes in provincial legislation could foster better municipal budgeting, but cities also have the capacity to present more meaningful numbers on their own. Having comparable accounting standards among all levels of government is critical to understanding the relative fiscal health of each level – especially important if provinces look to give cities new tax powers or direct financial supports. Both provinces and municipalities should take steps to improve the fiscal accountability of municipalities and the stewardship of municipal funds.","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124491272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 9

The 1939 Pari-Mutuel Referendum in Saratoga Springs 1939年在萨拉托加斯普林斯举行的Pari-Mutuel公投

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-08-24 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2649987

Bennett Liebman

引用次数: 0

Ownership of the NYRA Racetrack Properties: 1983 in Review NYRA赛马场财产所有权:1983年回顾

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-08-24 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2650038

Bennett Liebman

引用次数: 0

State-Level Origins of the United States Labor Relations Order 美国劳动关系法令的州一级起源

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-07-10 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2629432

A. Daniel

{"title":"State-Level Origins of the United States Labor Relations Order","authors":"A. Daniel","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2629432","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2629432","url":null,"abstract":"Why did the United States adopt its labor laws? The extant federal laws have undergone little substantive change since 1959, and are mainly intact from the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the 1935 Wagner Act. This paper goes back to the Wagner to Taft-Hartley period to ask why some states adopted precursor laws to Taft-Hartley while others did not. These states are valuable and understudied sites of investigation in the development of the United States labor relations order. A key lesson of the state-level experience during the 1930s and 1940s is that Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) density and militance are linked with the adoption of restrictive labor laws. These laws were adopted because they served to restrain organized worker resistance in the form of strikes. The resultant decline in efficacious militance led to the present political canalization of American labor unions. In this paper, I construct a unique dataset of state-level characteristics and laws from 1936 to 1948 and deploy penalized maximum likelihood logistic regression to evaluate standard American Political Development theories of New Deal policy change. Labor militance is found to be a strong predictor of restrictive law adoption. My findings suggest that extant explanations give short shrift to CIO disruption-backlash in the states in explaining the crystallizing of the long-running and extant labor law. This paper is of interest to students of New Deal policy, the development of the United States labor relations order, and American Political Development generally.","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122019791","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

But What About Texas? Climate Disruption Regulation in Recalcitrant States 但是德克萨斯州呢?桀骜不驯州的气候破坏监管

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-05-18 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2625713

T. McGarity

{"title":"But What About Texas? Climate Disruption Regulation in Recalcitrant States","authors":"T. McGarity","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2625713","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2625713","url":null,"abstract":"The State of Texas has had a long history of resistance to federal environmental regulation. For most of the past forty years, Texas’s political leadership has been far more concerned about the negative impact that environmental regulation could have on economic growth than with the effects that pollutants could have on human beings and the global environment. The state’s environmental protection agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (“TCEQ”), has historically taken the position that its highly qualified staff is capable of achieving the Clean Air Act’s environmental goals with little oversight from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”). The state’s powerful congressional delegation has often persuaded EPA to look the other way when TCEQ failed to meet the state’s obligations under federal law. Despite frequent complaints from environmental groups that TCEQ was a “toothless lapdog” for the industries that it was supposed to be regulating, EPA has historically handled Texas with kid gloves.That changed rather dramatically during the Obama Administration when a committed EPA Regional Administrator assumed permitting responsibilities for the greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions of major stationary sources in Texas after TCEQ’s Chairman and the Attorney General of Texas informed EPA that Texas would have no part of a program that they believed to be wholly unlawful and illegitimate. At the same time that Texas refused to implement EPA’s GHG regulations, it vigorously challenged them in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Texas ultimately lost all of those appeals, the most recent of which was the Supreme Court’s decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA (“UARG”). But by no means is Texas resigned to following EPA’s lead in regulating GHG emissions to avoid climate disruption.This Essay will recount the history of EPA’s efforts to deal with a recalcitrant state bureaucracy and EPA-bashing political leaders as EPA attempted to reduce GHG emissions in a state that emitted more GHGs than any other state. It will then offer some observations on the impact of UARG on the future of GHG regulation in Texas, a state that views UARG as a victory and remains adamantly opposed to regulating GHGs unless required to do so by federal law.","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114888266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Federal Programs and the Real Costs of Policing 联邦计划和警察的实际成本

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-04-01 DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2600606

Rachel Harmon

{"title":"Federal Programs and the Real Costs of Policing","authors":"Rachel Harmon","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2600606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2600606","url":null,"abstract":"Dozens of federal statutes authorize federal agencies to give money and power to local police departments and municipalities in order to improve public safety. While these federal programs encourage better coordination of police efforts and make pursuing public safety less financially costly for local communities, they also encourage harmful policing. Of course, policing often interferes with our interests in autonomy, privacy, and property, and those harms are often worthwhile in exchange for security and order. Federal public safety programs, however, are designed, implemented, and evaluated without reference to the nonbudgetary costs of policing. When those costs are high, federal programs can make local policing seem cheaper for communities, but actually make it more costly in its impacts and therefore less efficient.The coercion costs of policing are overlooked in most assessments of policing policy, not just in federal programs. Ordinarily, however, even when they are not formally recognized, those costs are accounted for, at least to some degree, in local political processes because local government officials experience public ire when the harms of policing become too great. Unfortunately, federal programs also frequently undermine this check on the intrusiveness of local policing. Internalizing the nonbudgetary costs of policing depends on public capacity to monitor harmful police conduct and on city officials’ capacity to influence police conduct. Some federal programs interfere with these conditions by clouding responsibility for law enforcement coercion and by giving money directly to departments rather than to municipalities. Thus, federal programs not only ignore significant costs of the policies they subsidize, they also interfere with the usual local mechanisms for managing those costs. Until federal public safety programs are approached with a more complete understanding of policing - one that attends to its full costs and the need for accountability - federal programs will continue to promote policing practices that do more harm than necessary and maybe even more harm than good.","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"71 9","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120912245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 19

Great Beer, Good Intentions, Bad Law: The Unconstitutionality of New York's Farm Brewery License 好啤酒，善意，坏法律:纽约农场啤酒厂执照的违宪性

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-02-02 DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.2483889

E. Hawkins

引用次数: 2

Toward Coherent Federal Oversight of Medicine 走向连贯的联邦医药监督

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-01-08 DOI: 10.31228/osf.io/5x7mv

Patricia J. Zettler

{"title":"Toward Coherent Federal Oversight of Medicine","authors":"Patricia J. Zettler","doi":"10.31228/osf.io/5x7mv","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31228/osf.io/5x7mv","url":null,"abstract":"The conventional wisdom in U.S. health law and policy holds that states regulate medical practice – the activities of physicians and other health care professionals – while the federal government regulates medical products. But relying on states as the principal regulators of medical practice has, at times, driven law and policy in directions that are problematic from a public health perspective, as demonstrated by a deadly 2012 outbreak of fungal meningitis that was linked to a state-regulated practice known as drug compounding. This Article argues that the federalism concerns underlying the conventional wisdom are misplaced. It demonstrates that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the federal government is deeply entangled in regulating medical practice, and such federal regulation is lawful. After examining the goals of federalism within the context of medicine, the Article proposes an alternate paradigm for guiding decisions about the division of labor between states and the federal government: Congress and administrative agencies should exert federal authority when medical practice contributes to a national public health problem for which state regulation is inadequate. This framework is applied to one pressing public health problem to which medical practice contributes – antibiotic resistance – to show how the framework could be implemented. Federal oversight of medical practice under this framework would be more principled and transparent than the scheme of federal control that is in place today.","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129581211","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 5

The Sec Rule 506’s Bad Actor Rule: A Condition or an Invalidator of Rule 506 Exemption Status? 美国证券交易委员会506规则的不良行为者规则:506规则豁免状态的条件或无效因素?

State & Local Government eJournal Pub Date : 2015-01-05 DOI: 10.2139/SSRN.2556449

J. McMurdo

{"title":"The Sec Rule 506’s Bad Actor Rule: A Condition or an Invalidator of Rule 506 Exemption Status?","authors":"J. McMurdo","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2556449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2556449","url":null,"abstract":"Federal securities regulation in the United States has one principle goal: to ensure that investors are able to make informed decisions regarding potential investments. To achieve this, federal regulations oblige firms to be forthright with shareholders and potential investors through disclosing material facts, projects, performance metrics, and the like. However, both the states and the federal government regulate securities and, in some cases, there is a clear dividing line between what falls under federal jurisdiction and what is left to the states. In other cases, determining this line is far from clear, resulting in a murky and complex overlap of federal and state regulations. For example, a state could aim to protect state investors by bringing a fraud action against an issuer on the offering’s merits, yet that same offering would be federally compliant and unobjectionable. Because state and federal regulations may have different objectives, investor protection versus disclosure respectively, the tension between them can raise federalism concerns when an offering abides federal regulations yet is deficient under state laws with concurrent jurisdiction. To simplify overlapping state and federal securities regulations, in 1996 Congress passed the National Securities Markets Improvement Act (“NSMIA”) to preempt states from regulating “covered” securities, leaving covered securities solely under substantive federal regulation. While various types of securities are covered, the Security and Exchange Commission (“SEC”)’s Rule 506 of Regulation D (“Rule 506”) is a prevalent regulation for offerings to qualify as a covered security. Rule 506 covers private offerings that are only available to sophisticated buyers and/or limited in its solicitation methods. Rule 506 provides a “safe harbor” that exempts the private offering from both federal and state registration if its prescribed conditions are met. In response to the economic havoc wrought by the 2008 Great Recession, the SEC introduced several major changes to Rule 506, including the addition of a rule that disqualifies “bad actors” convicted of fraud-related crimes (“Bad Actor Rule”) from relying on Rule 506 for an exempted status. Recent judicial decisions have required an issuer to prove that it is in substantive compliance with Rule 506’s conditions before the offering is actually exempt from state laws. However, if an issuer must prove compliance before being exempted from state securities law, may state securities regulators rebut an issuer’s claimed Rule 506 exemption with evidence that the issuer is non-compliant with the Bad Actor Rule? In other words, may state regulators who have evidence that an issuer has violated the Bad Actor Rule use that evidence to disqualify that issuer from relying on Rule 506 because a condition of Rule 506 is that the issuer must be a “good actor,” in a manner of speaking? Setting aside the merits of this argument for a moment, this Article applies standard","PeriodicalId":368113,"journal":{"name":"State & Local Government eJournal","volume":"101 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114723229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0