It didn't have to be this way.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
The Original Sin Of Barack Obama's Presidency
It didn't have to be this way.
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
NYT's Bill Keller spiked NSA spying story in 2004
" United States of Secrets ," a new PBS Frontline airing tonight, explores 'the dramatic inside story of the U.S. government's massive and controversial secret surveillance program—and the lengths the…
And the NYT paid Keller half a million a year for this valuable service. Meritocracy!
Carroll Gardens Couple Swindled Out Of Wedding Deposit
Quite a few young Brooklyn couples found out last week that their wedding deposits to Brooklyn restaurateur Jason Stevens of Rebar has been lost. It is unlikely that they will ever see their money again, as evidence mounds that Stevens, who has disappeared, was under investigation and owed the IRS quite a bit of money. One of the unlucky couples is from Carroll Gardens. Stephanie Kutch and her fiancé Christian Pascarella visited ReBar a few times in the past few months before deciding to have their special day at the popular Dumbo venue. Between visits, the fee kept on increasing, so Jason Stevens encouraged the young couple to pay the entire fee in advance "to lock in the price." Stephanie and Christian handed Jason $17,500 of their hard earned money in March 2014.
Typos courtesy of my iPhone
Reminder To Elites: Bastille Day Is Coming Up
"Not surprisingly countries that reduced or removed inheritance taxes saw the most rapid rise in inequality since the 1980s. Below I use the data from Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty and Saez's World Top Incomes Database to show this relationship: OnePercent-660x252 The top 1% share of income shoots up in the 1980s in the UK, US and Australia, while staying steady in France, and also Germany (at least till the late 1990s). Once again the political tide is in favour of taxing wealth. The economic debate, however, is settled. Wealth taxes reduce inequality. Most countries already implement taxes on wealth to some degree, either through annual or inheritance taxes, and have institutional mechanisms in places to administer the them. The sceptics do raise an important political question, but we should learn from history and see that democratic processes, in which economists play a part, can provide avenues for change."
Increase marginal income taxes and marginal estate taxes and treat investment income as ordinary income, and this will sort itself out over time without violent upheaval. Bastille Day is just around the corner though, for those wondering about the alternative.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
More On Rutgers Commencement Trainwreck
"… This all begins with idiots and their awful dreams. Rutgers, New Jersey's state university, is one of the few institutions in the state that can broadly be said to work very well, and has survived the fat-fingered kleptocrats and reptiles and backslapping sociopaths that have attempted to loot or compromise it from the governor's mansion… [School president Dr. Robert] Barchi's mandate at Rutgers has been twofold, although the two are related. The job Barchi clearly regards as foremost is that of implementing Governor Chris Christie's over- haul of the state's higher education system, a costly and dubiously necessary process done without any state aid, at a school that is already awash in some very dumb debt. Barchi was also tasked with gigging various college rankings systems to increase the school's profile — out-of-state tuition is the last, best plan to pay for all this… Because this entire gambit was conceived and executed by idiots — or, more precisely, cynical technocrats without any great respect for the importance of an institution like Rutgers in a state like New Jersey — we have gotten what we've gotten. The goonish pretense that led the school to invite Condoleezza Rice to give the address in the first place, because she is a famous political person — and then have to rescind the invitation because a great many students and faculty consider her to be, um, a war criminal — is symptomatic of this. A former Secretary of State, even this semi-disgraced former Secretary of State, is the sort of speaker that Barchi's Rutgers would have giving a commencement speech. But, because this is Barchi's Rutgers, this is the Secretary of State they got. The decision to offer the honor to Eric LeGrand, the unsinkable and happily heroic former Rutgers player who was paralyzed in a game, was a corrective — here, after an embarrassment, was the one Rutgers alum that most everyone in New Jersey feels good about. The decision to take that invitation back and give it to Tom Kean, a perfectly decent governor from the state's long line of Anthropomorphized Boat Shoe elites, whose last year in Trenton was 1990, was a return to that parodic pretense. The late-breaking decision to have LeGrand speak as well is laudable, but the broader gong show remains what it is…"
Typos courtesy of my iPhone
Last Unit Of Affordable Housing In Carroll Gardens
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| Open layout, drenched with sunlight, prime 2nd Place location. Perfect for empty nesters. |
At press time, there were multiple offers.
Friday, May 9, 2014
Catholic Church Getting Back To Basics
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis called Friday for governments to redistribute wealth to the poor in a new spirit of generosity to help curb the "economy of exclusion" that is taking hold today. Francis made the appeal during a speech to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies who are meeting in Rome this week. Latin America's first pope has frequently lashed out at the injustices of capitalism and the global economic system that excludes so much of humanity.
I'm really digging this Pope.
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