By Allie Nash
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – Charities that use gambling to raise revenue have something to be excited about.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill that would raise the prize on charity gaming events from $10,000 to $30,000.

The bill garnered just eight no votes in the Senate.

Representatives of charities testified in a committee meeting earlier this session that they need higher payouts because Ohio and Kentucky don’t have caps on winnings. They cited Indiana’s cap on payouts and a smoking ban for a decline in gambling revenues.

The bill now moves to the House for consideration.

Allie Nash is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

STATEHOUSE – House Bill (HB) 1286 authored by State Representative Holli Sullivan (R-Evansville) passed out of the House today with a unanimous vote and will now go to the Senate further discussion.

HB 1286 requires the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT), the Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV), the Indiana Finance Authority and Purdue University to provide annual reports to the Joint Study Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Assessment and Solutions.

“This method has been used successfully by the Indiana Utility and Regulatory Commission for a long time as a way to collect information,” said Rep. Sullivan. “Not only will this give legislators timely, relevant data to help them work successfully during the interim, it will also give more detailed insight into how we can continue improving Indiana’s transportation systems. I look forward to seeing this legislation move through the Senate.”

For more information on HB 1286, visit www.iga.in.gov.

(Washington, DC) – Congressman Larry Bucshon, a physician from Southern Indiana, released the following statement in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Dr. Bucshon stated:

“I hoped the President would take tonight as an opportunity to offer real solutions that address the challenges we face as a nation.  Families are struggling in the Obama economy, growth is stagnate, and confidence is at an all time low, yet we heard the same political rhetoric from behind the podium.

“The President called for action on jobs, yet his policies have led to the lowest labor force participation rate since the Carter administration, more Americans are living in poverty than when he took office, and nearly 8 million Americans are involuntarily employed part-time.

“Despite the President’s promises, healthcare costs are on the rise, patients are being dropped from their health plans, and many are losing access to their doctors. Young people are struggling to get on their feet and find a job after they graduate from college.

“The House is working to expand opportunity for all Americans so that they can build better lives. We’ve passed over 40 jobs bills that still sit in the Senate, including approval of the Keystone pipeline. We’ve offered healthcare reforms that reduce rising costs and put patients back in charge of their decisions because our goal is to provide quality, affordable healthcare to all Americans. And, we’ve worked to reform taxes so that everyone is on a level playing field.  

“Instead of reaching across the aisle to work with us on these issues, the President spoke more about executive fiat and working around Congress. This is not what our founders intended and is an ineffective approach to leadership during divided government.”

By Thomas Sowell

During a recent lunch in a restaurant, someone complimented my wife on the perfume she was wearing. But I was wholly unaware that she was wearing perfume, even though we had been in a car together for about half an hour driving to the restaurant.

My sense of smell is very poor. But there is one thing I can smell far better than most people — gas escaping. During my years of living on the Stanford University campus, and walking back and forth to work at my office, I more than once passed a faculty house and smelled gas escaping. When there was nobody home I would leave a note, warning them.

When walking past the same house again a few days later, I could see where the utility company had been digging in the yard — and, after that, there was no more smell of gas escaping. But apparently the people who lived in these homes had not smelled anything.

These little episodes have much wider implications. Most of us are much better at some things than at others, and what we are good at can vary enormously from one person to another. Despite the preoccupation — if not obsession — of intellectuals with equality, we are all very unequal in what we do well and what we do badly.

They may not be innate, like a sense of smell, but differences in capabilities are inescapable, and they make a big difference in what and how much we can contribute to each other’s economic and other kinds of well-being. If we all had the same capabilities and the same limitations, one individual’s limitations would be the same as the limitations of the entire human species.

We are lucky that we are so different, so that the capabilities of many other people can cover our limitations.

One of the problems with so many discussions of income and wealth is that the intelligentsia are so obsessed with the money that people receive that they give little or no attention to what causes money to be paid to them in the first place.

Money itself is not wealth. Otherwise the government could make us all rich just by printing more of it. From the standpoint of a society as a whole, money is just an artificial device to give us incentives to produce real things — goods and services. Those goods and services are the real “wealth of nations,” as Adam Smith titled his treatise on economics in the 18th century.

Yet when the intelligentsia discuss such things as the historic fortunes of people like John D. Rockefeller, they usually pay little — if any — attention to what it was that caused so many millions of people to voluntarily turn their individually modest sums of money over to Rockefeller, adding up to his vast fortune.

What Rockefeller did first to earn their money was find ways to bring down the cost of producing and distributing kerosene to a fraction of what it had been before his innovations. This profoundly changed the lives of millions of working people.

Before Rockefeller came along in the 19th century, the ancient saying “the night cometh, when no man can work” still applied. There were not yet electric lights, and burning kerosene for hours every night was not something that ordinary working people could afford. For many millions of people, there was little to do after dark except go to bed.

Too many discussions of large fortunes attribute them to “greed” — as if wanting a lot of money is enough to cause other people to hand it over to you. It is a childish idea when you stop and think about it — but who stops and thinks these days?

The transfer of money was a zero-sum process. What increased the wealth of society was Rockefeller’s cheap kerosene that added hundreds of hours of light to people’s lives annually.

Edison, Ford, the Wright brothers, and innumerable others also created unprecedented expansions of the lives of ordinary people. The individual fortunes represented a fraction of the wealth created.

Even those of us who create goods and services in more mundane ways receive income that may be very important to us, but it is what we create for others with our widely varying capabilities that is the real wealth of nations.

Intellectuals’ obsession with income statistics — calling envy “social justice” — ignores vast differences in productivity that are far more fundamental to everyone’s well-being. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg has ruined many economies.

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute

Jeremy Heath filed on Thursday, January 23^rd in Indianapolis to run for State Representative for Indiana House District 77.

Mr. Heath is looking forward to serving the people of District 77.   He stated: “I will focus on the issues that Hoosiers care about most.  I know that Indiana can become a leader in business, education and overall innovation if we work together, and work on the right issues.  That’s why we need a representative in Indianapolis who will push to make Indiana all that it can be.  It would be a privilege to serve my neighbors and my community as their voice in Indianapolis on the road to renewed growth.”

Jeremy Heath is married to Sara Heath, and is the father of three young children.  He is a graduate of  the University of Evansville and recently completed “Administrator in Training” at the Good Samaritan Home in Evansville.