Category tax policy for the 99%
Why we have no recovery
I’ve been taking a tip-toe through Craigslist for the past few days, and (as usual) I’ve found some interesting positions. It is amazing how many prospective employers want folks to work for free at tasks that used to be, well, you know, JOBS. Jobs that paid, even if they didn’t pay much. So that was […]
Monday Was War Tax Day!
Monday is War Tax Day! Well, the date has passed, but it’s useful to remind people of how the money they sent (or didn’t send) to the IRS on April 15 is used. Many people already know this. It actually applies to the current discussion about ‘chained CPI’, since the trust fund budget is balanced–it’s […]
Monday is War Tax Day!
It’s that time of year again–I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails from my peacenik friends asking me to join them on the steps of the Post Office (or wherever things are happening) to remind hapless individuals paying the IRS on Monday exactly what their money is going for. The go-to source for me is the […]
Will Kevin Ware get Workers’ Comp?
Let me say first that as the owner of two fractured tibia (now mended, thank God) and two fractured fibula (ditto), I have nothing but sympathy for Kevin Ware, the Louisville basketball guard who was gruesomely injured on Sunday in a game against Duke University. I also hereby own that I have not availed myself of […]
Unemployment drags on
A pair of articles recently in the Huffington Post about unemployment. The first was about Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve, and its prediction that unemployment will stay above 6.5% for the next two years at least. The Fed thus sees no good reason to raise interest rates. Parenthetically, the lousy returns on savings and CD’s are […]
$22,000,000,000,000
Twenty-two trillion dollars. I thought I’d write it out. That’s not some random number I came up with off the top of my head–That’s the number from a study by the Government Accountability Office, and it’s their best guess of the money lost when the economy went off a cliff in the summer of 2008. […]
Why do Conservatives use Facebook?
I admit it–I’m a Facebook junkie. But lately, my enthusiasm has dropped a good deal because I’m not hearing from a lot of people. As part of my work here (and my work on various social causes), I’m subscribed to a gazillion pages and friend accounts. And unbeknownst to me, Facebook has limits on the […]
Don’t know much about Statistics, either
Once upon a time, there was a man named John Williams. He wrote the music for the Star Wars movies and became quite famous. This is quite unfortunate for the John Williams I’d like to tell you about today. The John Williams I’m writing about has no aspirations to music as far as I know. […]
New York doesn’t make anything anymore
A rather chirpy story from UPI (chirpy if you work in medicine) hit the papers today. Per the headlines, nine of the 20 largest employers in the State of New York are hospitals or healthcare networks. The North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System is the #1 employer in the state, with some 37,000 employees. That’s about […]
Don’t know much about history…
I know when I’m watching a bad interview on TV or the Internet. The question comes up: “What was the most influential book you read in (high school, college)?” Standard answers include the Bible, Catcher in the Rye, Atlas Shrugged (though not in MY crowd), A Separate Peace, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. You know […]
The Brooklyn Culture Jam 