"Obama May Levy $15 Billion Tax on Oil Company Profit."
McCain should counter by proposing a $15 billion tax on law firms' profits.
Also, lots and lots of Americans work for oil companies. Oil companies should sent out memos to their employees explaining how a $15 billion tax would force them to cut wages.
Author Ryan Sorba spoke at Smith College Tuesday night. He was sponsored by the Smith Republican club. Because they disagreed with his views on homosexuality many Smith students rioted forcing an early end to the talk. At least one Smith student has filed criminal assault charges as a result of being shoved during the riot.
I suspect that one of the goals of the rioters was to convince non-left wing high school students to avoid Smith.
As the author of a college textbook, I found this article on the high price of textbooks to be consistent with what I have learned about the textbook market.
The Internet has made it more difficult for politicians to pander to one group in a way that is offensive to another group because the second group is now likely to find out what the politician said to the first group.
Advertisers have an analogous problem.
Ted Turner believes that overpopulation is causing global warming and global warming will destroy the world's economy, turning humans into cannibals.
Isn't the obvious solution for people to start becoming cannibals now so we can quickly reduce the human population and so avoid global warming. Of course cannibalism might harm Turner's Buffalo meat business so perhaps this is why he isn't endorsing it. It's unfortunate how self-interest often prevents environmentalists from advocating for what is truly best for the Earth.
"Kentucky spends more than $18,600 to house one inmate for a year... In California, each inmate costs an average of $46,104 to incarcerate."
So shouldn't Kentucky buy California inmates for -$30,000 or so a year?
A professor at Syracuse University will immediately end class if he catches a student "sending text messages or reading a newspaper in class." (HT Instapundit)
Wouldn't a more effective deterrent be to extend class (or better yet hold an extra weekend class that covers material that will be on the test ) if any student is caught texting?
According to the Women's Center at Murray State, actions that should be considered sexual harassment include "Looking a person up and down (elevator eyes)"
Well, if true then the only way to stop college boys from sexually harassing college girls is to force the girls to wear burqas.
A white woman and a black man compete for the Democratic presidential nomination. Party leaders fear that if the black man loses many blacks won't vote Democratic in the general election, but they also worry that if the white woman loses then many normally Democratic voting white women will turn Republican in the general election. So what do some party leaders want to do to solve their identity politics problem? They want to give the nomination to a white male! (HT Instapundit)
Obama is talking about significantly increasing capital gains taxes. If investors believe him this will cause the stock market to fall. And a falling stock market will help Obama become president.
There must be many instances of happy home foreclosures. For example, imagine you bought a home for $300,000 putting only $15,000 down. Then the value of your home drops to $200,000. You then decide to buy another home for $300,000 and since the market has worsened you get a much larger home than you had before. Finally you default on the mortgage on your first home. On net you lose your initial $15,000 but get a much better home than before so you are better off because of the housing price fall.
Expedia and I had a $400 disagreement over how much they had charged me. I got no where even after spending 2 hours on the phone with them. But after I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, Expedia quickly withdrew the disputed $400 charge from my credit card account.
Megan McArdle asks whether we should boycott the Olympics over China's repression in Tibet. While China's actions in Tibet are reprehensible, over the last few decades the Chinese government has done much to increase the sum of human happiness. China's tremendously high growth rate has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This rapid economic growth has been one of the greatest accomplishments in all human history and should at least be considered when deciding whether the Chinese Olympics should be boycotted.
The Freakonomics blog asks what can be done to close the academic achievement gap between black and white students. Lets ignore the race issue and consider how we could close the gap between all high and low achievement kids. Here are two easy ways:
(1) Allow high achieving kids to attend school only two days a week.
(2) Give low but not high achieving kids Modafinil.
I bet these two ideas would work far better than anything discussed in the above linked extremely lengthy Freakonomics blog post.By the time of the Dem convention Obama will almost certainly have a majority of pledge delegates and a majority of the popular vote. Obama also has far more campaign funds than Hillary and is better liked by Democrats. Yet Intrade still gives Hillary a 28% chance of winning the nomination. Why so high?
Perhaps the market is factoring in the possibility of a scandal-induced Obama collapse or it's taking into account the Clinton machine's hold over super delegates.
A dictator running a country that has a large supply of natural resources can profit even if he horribly mistreats his people. Normally if a dictator shoots, starves and uneducates his citizens, then his nation's economy will crash and the dictator won't be able to extract much wealth from it. But natural resources change this. For example, if a dictator's country contains huge oil reserves he can bring in foreigners to extract and sell this oil. The dictator, in this case, can become rich without help from any of his citizens and so the dictator can freely mistreat his people and still turn his power into plentiful profit.
Similarly, most employers can't horribly mistreat their workers and still expect their workers to do productive stuff. So even if an employer wants and is able to exploit his workers to the maximum degree, he still has some incentives to treat his workers well so they can produce wealth for him.
But a young pretty prostitute is, in a sense, a "natural resource" for a pimp. Even if she is mistreated to the point where she can do no productive (non-sex) work, she can still make her pimp much money. Profit, therefore, doesn't necessarily constrain the cruelty of pimps and resource-rich dictators.
One argument against prostitution is that it harms prostitutes but the prostitutes are too irrational to realize this so they need the government to protect them by outlawing prostitution. But the government punishes prostitutes by putting them in small metal cages (jail). How is this helping them?
To make the paternalistic argument you have to claim that fear of prison stops some women from becoming prostitutes. But if a woman is rational enough to be deterred by threat of prison from being a prostitute why is she not rational enough to rationally weigh the costs and benefits of becoming a prostitute? The paternalistic argument against prostitution relies on potential prostitutes having not too much, but also not too little rationality.
Andrew Sullivan believes that if he becomes president Obama's skin color will reduce the hatred many Muslims feel towards the U.S.
I'm not sure about this. I suspect there is a tremendous amount of anti-black racism in the Arab world, and having a black president might just cause many Muslim-Arabs to hate us even more than they already do. The treatment of blacks in Sudan (and the indifference towards this in the Arab world) does indicate a shocking amount of hatred towards blacks in this part of the globe.
The left has convinced many Americans that we are a deeply racist society. But in truth I think there is far less racism in the U.S. than in most every other country.
Of course, I don't think any of this is a reason to vote against Obama.
I was on NPR's the Bryant Park Project on March 10 talking about political strategy and the Democratic nomination fight. You can listen to me here.
In Sweden it's legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it. According to Slate.com, hyper-feminist Catharine MacKinnon believes "This is the only approach to prostitution that's based on 'sex equality,'...It treats prostitution as a social evil but views the women who do it as the victims of sexual exploitation who 'should not be victimized again by the state by being made into criminals'".
But criminalising the purchase of sex does harm prostitutes. Consider a man who is willing to pay $100 for legal sex. If he faces the prospect if being arrested for buying this sex he will pay less for it and so the prostitute will suffer.
Criminalizing sex is like imposing a tax on it. And economic theory teaches that there is usually no difference between when you impose a tax on consumers or when you impose it on producers. In both cases the consumers and producers are exactly as well off as if the tax had been imposed on the other party.
MSNBC has what appears to be a heartwarming story about a 17-month-old girl who can read. What the story doesn't tell you is that the girl is almost certainly hyperlexic and most hyperlexic children are autistic. It's too early to tell for sure, but the odds of this girl being a high functioning autistic are extremely high.
Early intervention might be very helpful to autistic children. (Research is lacking on this point.) Parents of extremely early-reading children (kids who can read before they turn 2 and a half) should know that they should get their kids tested for autism. But after reading this article such parents will be falsely reassured that having an early reader child is nothing to be concerned about.
