Nov 14 2008
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Nov 13 2008
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“ But whatever your feeling about government intervention in the economy, or the correct level of income inequality, I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: for the world to get better, things that don’t work have to fail. We cannot keep alive every company, every car and every job that someone once liked, because that way lies stagnation and death. Places where production decisions are made based on how much labor they can consume, rather than how much value they can produce, make everyone in society worse off in the long run.
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“ An MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, explained the network’s misstep by saying someone in the newsroom received the Palin item in an e-mail message from a colleague and assumed it had been checked out. “It had not been vetted,” he said. “It should not have made air.
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Please tell me you see the irony in the vetted part.
Nov 12 2008
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“ These vital towns, where generations of people lived happy lives and raised fat, burbling babies to a middle-class adulthood, are all dying. Should the government save these places too? Shall we support Eastman Kodak indefinitely, whether or not it can produce a product anyone wants to buy? And Xerox, and Carrier, and a thousand companies you’ve never heard of? Shall we make it illegal to make a better product than American corporations? Why not just ban new products that make old ones unprofitable? To do that, we’ll have to take the money from other people, in other cities. Other businesses will not get the capital that we give to dying firms, so they won’t expand. Some other families, not yours, will lose their homes because their business failed, or have to move away from home in order to get jobs because their area is in the doldrums. Meanwhile, everyone in the country will be slightly worse off, because we’ve shifted limited economic resources towards products they demonstrably do not want.
Nov 11 2008
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“ President-elect Barack Obama says moneyed interests won’t have an inside track in his White House, but six of the 15 people he named to his transition team are top fundraisers. They include Julius Genachowski, a former technology and news media executive and an Obama classmate at Harvard Law who raised more than $500,000 for the campaign, and Federico Peña, a two-time Cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration who is a managing partner in a global investment firm. He collected more than $50,000.
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Obama transition team heavy with big fundraisers
Change? Ha!
Nov 09 2008
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“ Several other tax lawyers, all of whom represent banks, said the change was legal. Like DeSouza, they said the legal authority came from Section 382 itself, which says the secretary can write regulations to “carry out the purposes of this section.” Section 382 of the tax code was created by Congress in 1986 to end what it considered an abuse of the tax system: companies sheltering their profits from taxation by acquiring shell companies whose only real value was the losses on their books. The firms would then use the acquired company’s losses to offset their gains and avoid paying taxes.
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A Quiet Windfall For U.S. Banks
All government interventions have unintended consequences. The fact that people are shocked that something like this happened is shocking.