Their enterprise security and controls are better than either DropBox or Google.

Burn the witch!

Thought I'd look it up since not going every flipping year would be nice. Per the tx.gov site: all cars must be inspected annually but brand new cars can go two years before their first one.

See: http://www.dps.texas.gov/RSD/VI/CostOfInsp.htm

"perhaps a similar approach would be to meter charging stations and tax on that?"

Also a simple and perfectly rational way to do it.

Huh..and to think I've been wasting my time getting an annual inspection in Texas every year. I do get that nice window decal though, so I guess it's not all bad.

Interstate commerce. Normally I'm all for state's rights, but this is one area where there's actually a Constitutional basis to tell the State to get bent.

Because it's not worth the time or expense to NOT tax you for driving on them when in the vast majority of cases private roads are going to be the exception rather than the rule. Ditto for out-of-state driving except in border counties in which case maybe you give them a % break as compared to someone on the interior.

I think meerling's comment that there currently is no state inspection in Oregon is a higher hurdle to jump; in that case, trade-off's aren't so clear.

I still think you come down on the side of simplicity as much as possible. Cover your 80% use cases at the least cost and complexity and simply accept that you'll have some sort of dead weight loss whatever you choose. I think it's vastly preferable to granting your state government an official license to track all your movements.

why we're trying to over-complicate this? Take the odometer reading at annual inspection and be done with it.

Will there be corner cases where someone gets screwed under this system? Sure.

Is it worth all the trouble, expense, and privacy violations of being 100% perfect when 80% is good enough? No. Not even a little.

"There are very strong arguments for why education should be regulated at a national level."

I'd like to hear them. I don't think the evidence has been very good that the D of Ed has had any positive effect on educational outcomes despite ever escalating expenditures on education.

The important lesson here is that a project which ran over budget by more than 6x failed to meet a very foreseeable design requirement. Keep this in mind the next time you see someone on here assert that the ACA is going to reduce the deficit.

Yeah, I think they really missed the boat on this one: put up a pro-forma objection to the Republican delay plan, eventually give in to the Republicans (and thus getting what the ACA desperately needs: another year to work through the bugs), and then ride into the 2014 elections proudly trumpeting how they put the country before partisanship and pointing out that all of the ACA's benefits were delayed by the Republicans.

It was stupid of the Republicans to pick this fight at this date but it was even stupider of the Democrats not to cash in on it.

Elected officials are supposed to represent the views of the people who elected them, not some other group of people that believe things that you like better. Regardless if the districts were gerrymandered or not, the people who got elected were elected by the people in those districts. If those people are being fairly represented by the people they elected, then it's working as designed.

If you want to proposed that we do away with the way districts are structured, then I'm in complete agreement with you in principle. But that's a battle for another thread.

I'm suggesting two things:

1) Congress screwed their own staff over, in the same way that they screwed all the rest of us over, because they couldn't be bothered to read and debate the bill before they passed it. So the Executive is going to fix their little 'oopsie' for them (illegally, I feel); for us? Not so much.

2) Employers are already making negative changes to their health coverage (or their projected health care coverage liabilities) and I think it's reasonable to assume this is going to continue if not accelerate. UPS cut off working spouse coverage with no change in compensation. On top of that, there are too many stories to list of companies that are cutting back working hours to avoid having to pay up under the law and that's certainly a cut in compensation.

"You know other countries have specific laws against the practice of tacking unrelated laws into government finance bills"

Oh, the irony. Had such a thing been in place the PPACA wouldn't have become law in the first place.

HA! Four MONTHS!?! Yeah, you really showed them!