Posts Tagged taxes

The Older I Get, the Less I Understand….

Final week is over, grades are in, and I’ve had more time to read the news. That’s obviously a mixed blessing. There are so many things I just don’t understand. There’s a toaster that embosses the face of Jesus on each piece of bread as it toasts. It is evidently selling briskly. There’s Newt Gingrich. [...]

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Did Not! Did So!

Ah, budget battles. This morning’s Star detailed the back and forth political arguments about whether the Ballard Administration actually made the budget cuts the mayor promised during his campaign. Their independent analysis amounted to: who knows? That’s not a criticism of the reporters–it’s a reflection of the games public managers play. This actually began back [...]

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The Free Rider Problem

Yesterday I received my copy of PA Times–a publication that is admittedly unlikely to be on the bookshelves of those who read this blog. It’s issued by the Association for Public Administration, and it has articles that appeal primarily to geeks like me who study how governments work. The article that caught my attention–and raised [...]

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Learning from Experience

I know I have harped on the dismaying extent to which our policymakers legislate on the basis of ideology rather than evidence, but I want  to revisit that theme again today. Several people have commented on my recent post/IBJ column about the drug war–and the enormous sums we continue to spend (in a time of [...]

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Of Debt and Taxes

I haven’t written about the congressional impasse (polite word for food fight) over the debt ceiling, because really, what could I say that hasn’t been said many times by many people? But being here in Split, surrounded by evidence that human efforts at civilization have persisted over thousands of years, I’ve grudgingly recognized that our [...]

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