Albany watch: Expanding NY’s ‘Prevailing Wage’ Scam

Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature are on the verge of expanding projects subject to the “prevailing wage” — a state-mandated pay level for public works that, says the Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon at Newsday, is neither “prevailing nor limited to wages.” Though the phrase implies “the going rate of pay in a competitive market,” state law actually requires contractors to pay the amount set in union contracts that cover “as few as 30 percent of building trades workers.” And the “wage” includes “supplemental benefits.” The result: public projects that cost as much as 25 percent more, leading to “fewer new highways, transit upgrades” and other improvements. Rather than stretch “the noxious impact of prevailing wage,” argues McMahon, Albany should “reform the law — so that prevailing wage actually means what it implies.”

Foreign desk: Time’s Running Out To Help Taiwan

Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen wants Washington’s help in resisting Beijing’s efforts to control “Taiwanese politics and society,” reports Josh Rogin in The Washington Post. The Xi government in China has been using “economic and political pressure” to “turn the Taiwanese people and their leaders toward Beijing and against the West.” Taiwan’s January election “could be a tipping point after which Taiwan can never again exert its own sovereignty,” one official said. And while America’s interest in helping Taiwan is “understood,” warns Rogin, “our will is under question.” Time is “running out fast for the United States to show the Taiwanese people” they have support in resisting “Beijing’s dominance.”

From the right: AOC’s One-Woman War on Science

Abe Greenwald at Commentary believes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just revealed herself as a “one-woman war on science.” Greenwald points to her defense this week of her calls for climate-change action, when she cited “the kids in the South Bronx, which is suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country” and “the families in Flint, whose kids have their blood ascending in lead levels.” Yet the science behind actual rising health crises is “complicated and unresolved.” No one knows for sure why asthma has been on the rise. And as for the water crisis in Flint, Mich., it can be traced to “local cost-cutting and mismanagement” — which means it only “has to do with the Green New Deal to the extent that everything has to do with the Green New Deal.” Fact is, Greenwald asserts, “the science remains, at best, unsettled.” And Ocasio-Cortez’s “tirade makes it clear that our skepticism is our best defense.”

Education beat: DC Shouldn’t Pay for Special Olympics

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is “being roasted like a chestnut on an open fire” for pushing to zero out $17.6 million in funding for the Special Olympics, notes Nick Gillespie at Reason. Yet it’s the right move, particularly given Washington’s $22 trillion debt. The question, he notes, isn’t “whether the Special Olympics does good work. It’s whether it should be funded by the federal government.” The program, he notes, is not a “cure function of government,” and taxpayers “should not pay for everything that somebody wants.” Of course, President Trump has now said he won’t let her cuts will go through. Yet if he had, it’s no stretch to assume “the resulting outcry would lead to record donations.”

Conservative: Cops Again Prove Their Professionalism

Cops should be held “to high standards,” says Tom Rogan of The Washington Examiner, but the release of video this week of the Feb. 10 police shooting of Willie Robinson in South Carolina offers strong evidence of the “difficulty” of their work and their “professionalism.” After responding to a call, police heard gunfire from a residence, where a woman was later found shot. Robinson soon emerged with a handgun and screamed for the officers to “kill” him. Instead, police desperately tried to persuade him to surrender. Only when he pointed the gun at them did they shoot. “They did what they could to save him,” Rogan writes, but had to use force in the end. “This is hard and morally draining work,” he adds. “We should be grateful for those who choose” to do it.

— Compiled by Adam Brodsky