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.
RD to immigration advocates: are there any limits?
Offered opportunity to describe in extended interviews how U.S. immigration should ideally be regulated, no concrete limitations put forward.
Open spaces, closed files
Wouldn't facility by facility information on operating costs, staffing, and level of use help New York City's Parks Dept. and outside observers assess whether there is equity in funding between and among parks as well as the related question of whether and to what extent to rely on private as opposed to public funding? Good luck getting the data.
NYC gov't staffing, 1980 to present
Peaks and valleys across agencies and across the decades.
Neither rain nor snow nor occupy...
...can keep Congress and the press from shortsightedly focusing on "balanced" budget reductions despite a stalled economy and both long-term and short-term experience with the folly of austerity. It's like one of those arguments where you may think you're making headway, but where you get to the end and you might as well have saved your breath. Can anything prevent Democrats from seeking to give up hard-won gains?
You don't get answers if you don't ask questions
A perennial conceit of much of the press is “we don’t make the news, we only report the news.” A just-released poll, however — revealing overwhelming support for greater income and wealth equality — underlines how much real news has been ignored by reporters preoccupied with centrism and compromise as all-weather solutions.
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