The winner of the Platte Institute’s 2020 Connie Brown Freedom Award is Marc Nda. Nda, of Bennington, is the owner of Omaha and Lincoln-based Dignity Home Care. Nda became Nebraska’s leading advocate for ending the state’s Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity law for intrastate transportation services, also known as the Competitor’s Veto. This type of...
Your local property taxes go to your local community, and your state income and sales taxes pay for state services, right? Sometimes. But did you know that a significant amount of your state taxes are also redistributed back to local governments across Nebraska? According to a new report from the Nebraska Department of Revenue, in...
Introduction Much has changed since our 2018 review of Nebraska’s progress on occupational licensing policy and reform. The first year of licensing reviews growing out of LB299, Nebraska’s Occupational Board Reform Act, were completed in 2019. Committees of the Unicameral reviewed 26 individual licenses across eight of the standing committees. Several of the other committees—either...
This year’s Platte Institute Legislative Summit will be held online on Thursday, October 8. You can find free registration at PlatteInstitute.org/Events. The Summit, entitled Nebraska’s Next Normal, will discuss how leaders from different points of view can work together to help Nebraskans rise from the COVID-19 recession. Here’s the schedule of events : At 9 a.m....
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Nebraska has avoided efforts to raise state taxes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and is one of the few states whose revenues grew from the previous year. But states like New Jersey are providing an alternate view into what can happen when policymakers consistently rely on tax increases to paper over their financial...
Since the start of the pandemic, Americans have wondered when the job market would return to normal. For Nebraska, that time may be now. The Nebraska Department of Labor announced Friday that the state’s unemployment rate currently sits at 4%. That figure is not only the lowest in Nebraska since the beginning of the pandemic...
Government and industry responses to the COVID-19 pandemic created a variety of unique situations for agriculture. The “stay-at-home” orders forced consumers to be homebound, which increased the demand for food in grocery stores while simultaneously reducing the demand for food in restaurants. Reduced consumer travel caused the demand for ethanol to fall, impacting distillers’ grains,...
Sarah Curry joined KGFW’s Talk of the Town to discuss her new report, which reviews the transparency of the state’s tracking website for COVID-19 relief funds. Read the full report here.
Nebraska’s state budget is growing, but what area of spending is the largest and growing the fastest? Contrary to what many believe, K-12 education is not the largest expenditure in state government. Health and human services and higher education are larger state spending areas, with the state Department of Education coming in behind these two categories....
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit our nation, Congress reacted by enacting a historic $2 trillion spending plan to keep our nation from falling into financial ruin. In total, there have been four pieces[1] of federal legislation enacted with the intent to help individuals and states combat the health and economic crisis that occurred, of which...