Holidays at U.S. Parks: Usurped by Partisan Ideology

In the United States, Christmas is the last official holiday of the calendar-year, and Thanksgiving is the penultimate holiday. New Year’s Day is the first holiday of the year. Any other holidays among or between these are private rather than public holidays, and thus the public is not obliged to recognize those holidays as if they were equivalent to public holidays. Although New Year’s Day has remained safe from ideological attack, neither Thanksgiving nor Christmas have. Nevertheless, their status as official U.S. holidays has remained, at least as of 2025, and thus it remains as of then at least proper and fitting for Americans to refer to those holidays by name rather than by the denialist, passive-aggressive expression, happy holidays, which conveniently disappears even from retail clerks just in time for New Year’s because that holiday is ideologically permissible. The problem writ large is the influx of ideology trying to invalidate certain official United States holidays. By the end of 2025, the initial influx had triggered a counter-influx that is just as ideological, and thus only encircling certain (but not all) official holidays with ideology. The underlying fault lies in using the creation of a holiday to promote an ideology. 

The full essay is at "Holidays at U.S. Parks." 

Wasteful Agency-Spending: Employee Bonuses as a Solution

Use it or lose it. I am referring to “the habit of [U.S. Government] agencies spending all surplus funding at the end of the fiscal year in order to avoid budget reductions the following year.”[1] By spending the entire amount allotted for the budgetary year, a federal agency can avoid a lower base-line for the following year’s allotment from Congress. The incentive in this system is to spend every dollar in the budget, whether efficiently or profligately. The challenge is how to replace that incentive with another—one that results in efficient public budgeting. Unfortunately, relying on an incentive presupposes discretion, and one person can never be sure what lies behind another person’s use of it.

The full essay is at “Wasteful Agency-Spending.”

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[1] Andy Medici, “New Bill: Point Out Surplus Funds, Get a $10,000 Bonus,” Federal Times, May 21, 2015. 

Government Debt and Deficits: The U.S. and E.U. Federal Systems Compared

The willingness of U.S. Government officials to print money rather than tackle tough debt-cutting measures is in sharp contrast to the approaches to relieving the public debts in the E.U.  The state of Ireland, for example, nearly doubled its package of spending cuts and tax increases in 2010 to rein in its huge deficit.  Even so, borrowing costs in the states of Spain, Portugal and Greece spiked upward again in late 2010 and in 2011 amid bailouts by the E.U. via contributions from the state governments. The issues are as much political as economic.

The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.