BlackRock good; public employee pensions bad
Two recent NYT articles ignore altogether the need for a critical approach. In one, a front-pager billed as a news article, the reporter could easily be mistaken for a member of BlackRock's PR team. In the other, the reporter treated with contempt the idea that workers deserve to have bargained-for pensions benefits honored.
Poor, helpless Andrew Cuomo
The Governor has a 69 percent approval rating, totes around an adoring press corps, and has been described as the tamer of New York's dysfunctional legislature. But preventing a repeat of the state's usual gerrymandering process in this redistricting cycle was just not important enough to Cuomo. So he has broken his promise to veto cynical plans to reproduce the status quo.
How fiscally prudent is "lower the rate and broaden the base"?
It's the corporate tax reform mantra these days — at least on the Democratic side of the aisle. But serious questions have been raised about the underlying premises, fiscal prudence, and ultimate revenue neutrality of proceeding concurrently.
Bank profits: not so shabby after all
There has been a lot of reporting in recent weeks about how big banks have fallen on hard times. One would be forgiven for getting the impression that these banks are not doing much better than barely scraping by. But the data tell another story. In 2011, for example, the profits of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo each exceeded the profits of Google. The average profit from 2005 to 2011 for Apple was less than that for Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo.
New tactic on affirmative action could blunt Supreme Court rollback
As the Supreme Court looks ready to restrict or eliminate race-based affirmative action in its 2012-13 session, supporters of such preferences have a tool not yet deployed: race-based affirmative action as a means to compensate for the disproportionately negative impact of current-day "legacy admissions" policies on minority applicants.
A culture that celebrates cheating
Do all cultures celebrate cheating as much as we do? I’ll concede in advance the danger of falling into the this-is-the-worst-it-has-ever-been trap, and even acknowledge, on a moment’s reflection, that our time and place has no patent on pretense, disingenuousness, and deceit. But we are still in staggeringly bad shape.
Why are taxpayers helping companies pay for all their litigation?
An important benefit to one class of litigants is deeply baked into the current system. The tax code provides that businesses may deduct all of their legal expenses (lawyer and expert fees, and discovery costs) in all cases — win or lose, meritorious or non-meritorious, plaintiff or defendant.
NYT/CBS survey sticks with worst poll question in history
Apparently enamored of the virtues of "compromise" regardless of circumstance, the poll might just have well have asked: “Should officials in the two parties act like adults in order to get the country’s business accomplished, or should they insist on all their silly ‘positions’ as we watch effective governance grind to a halt?”
Let them eat iPhones
Apple's lack of any sense of obligation to support American workers — indeed, the lack of any national loyalty at all — is appalling. Yet that’s not even the truly frightening part of the recent New York Times story. Most troubling is the broader, underlying narrative conveyed and ultimately encouraged by the story: there is nothing that America as a nation can or should do to alter the trajectory of events.
Cheap labor not the way for U.S. to attract investment
Our article on how German automakers treat their workers in the U.S. less well than those in Germany highlighted a critical national choice: create structures that help to level the playing field between management and labor, or surrender to the pernicious idea that nothing can or should be done to restrict an employer race to the bottom.
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