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Fan May Owe Taxes For Claiming Jeter’s 3,000th Hit

12 Jul

Given that the federal government is in the business of giving out tax breaks to billionaire bankers and investors, surely it can give a much smaller tax break to the Yankee fan who caught Jeter’s 3000th hit.

“The legal question of whether it is a gift or prize is whether the transferor is giving the property out of detached and disinterested generosity,” Professor Graetz said. “It’s hard for me, not being a Yankee fan, to think of the Yankees as being in the business of exercising generosity to others, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that these were given out of generosity.”

via Fan May Owe Taxes For Claiming Jeter’s 3,000th Hit – NYTimes.com.

Medical Care in the USofA is a Disaster, a (minor) case in point

10 Jul

The problem is that there a tens of thousands of such cases every day, so the cumulative effect is not minor at all. It’s a disaster.

It became clear to me that as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care. The staff there don’t spend much time working up a more nuanced picture on initial evaluation because they don’t want one. They don’t efficiently discard the cases of people who’ve left the facility because they’re stalling the remainder deliberately.

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

FWIW, I don’t know whether Tim Burke, the author, has sought medical attention in Africa, but I know that he has done fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Africa is not an abstraction to him. & doubt that his reference to medical care there is a casual one.

H/t Aaron Bady.

via To a Medical Center in Fresno | Easily Distracted.

Taxes and Billionaires – NYTimes.com

7 Jul

The larger question is this: Do we try to balance budget deficits just by cutting antipoverty initiatives, college scholarships and other investments in young people and our future? Or do we also seek tax increases from those best able to afford them?

The answer to that question is easy, isn’t it? America is governed by the rich, for the rich, but of a hornwsoggled people.

via Taxes and Billionaires – NYTimes.com.

What happens on August 3? | Felix Salmon

7 Jul

Reuters has a fantastic story this evening on the impossible quandary facing Treasury officials should the unthinkable come to pass; purely as a practical matter, it’s far from clear that it’s even possible to stop making the 3 million payments that Treasury makes automatically every day. Doing so involves a massive computer-reprogramming effort which I’m sure could not be implemented overnight — and for political reasons nobody is going to get started on such an effort until after all hope is lost for a deal in Congress.

via What happens on August 3? | Felix Salmon. H/t Tyler Cowan.

Community News

7 Jul

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If the Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers Paid Taxes Like You and Me, We’d Cut 44 Billion of the National Deficit

6 Jul

The top 25 hedge fund managers in the United States collectively earned $22 billion last year, and yet they have their own cushy set of tax rules. If they operated under the same rules that apply to other people — police officers, for example, or teachers — the country could cut its national deficit by as much as $44 billion in the next ten years.

via If the Top 25 Hedge Fund Managers Paid Taxes Like You and Me, We’d Cut 44 Billion of the National Deficit | | AlterNet.

Happy Empire 4th

4 Jul

Yesterday, in anticipation of the 4th, Michael Sporn posted a series of wonderful photographs of the Empire State Building. They were taken by his friend, Steve Fisher. I urge you to take a look. There’s a wide range of views, and plenty of wit and wow!

I too have taken many photographs of the Empire State Building, all from New Jersey. In some shots the building is small, even almost invisible. In other shots it’s front and center. Here I offer one of each.

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The Wageless, Profitable Recovery – NYTimes.com

1 Jul

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

via The Wageless, Profitable Recovery – NYTimes.com.

Why people become chickenhawks – U.S. Military | All about American forces, Afghanistan, Iraq – Salon.com

30 Jun

Chicken-hawkery thrives in a post-universal-draft world where elites and their progeny don’t have to face the prospect of front-line duty.

For years, chickenhawkery’s roots in this culture of unshared sacrifice have been a matter of theory — albeit a logical, well-grounded theory. But now, thanks to a comprehensive new study, we have concrete data underscoring the hypothesis. It suggests that many Americans’ aggressively pro-war ideology may fundamentally rely on their being physically shielded/disconnected from the human cost of war.

To document this connection, Columbia’s Robert Erikson and University of California at Berkeley’s Laura Stoker went back to the Vietnam War — the last time Americans faced wartime conscription. The researchers analyzed data from the Jennings-Niemi Political Socialization Study of college-bound high schoolers and subsequent interviews of those same high-schoolers from 1965 onward. In the process, they discovered that men holding low draft lottery numbers (and therefore more at risk of being drafted into combat) “became more anti-war, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft.” Importantly, for these men “lottery number was a stronger influence on their political outlook than their late-childhood party identification.” …
No doubt, the antiwar voices who have recently argued for the reinstatement of a draft will find fuel in this Berkeley/Columbia report. They argue that viscerally connecting the entire nation to the blood-and-guts consequences of war will make the nation less reflexively supportive of war — and the new data substantively supports that assertion. That’s why in the midst of (at least) three U.S. military occupations, this report is almost sure to be ignored by our chickenhawk-dominated political class — because it too explicitly exposes the selfish, self-centered and abhorrent roots of the chickenhawk ethos that now plays such an integral role in perpetuating a state of Endless War.

via Why people become chickenhawks – U.S. Military | All about American forces, Afghanistan, Iraq – Salon.com.

Lawmakers Seek Inquiry of Natural Gas Industry – NYTimes.com

29 Jun

WASHINGTON — Federal lawmakers called Tuesday on several agencies, including the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the Energy Information Administration and the Government Accountability Office, to investigate whether the natural gas industry has provided an accurate picture to investors of the long-term profitability of their wells and the amount of gas these wells can produce.

via Lawmakers Seek Inquiry of Natural Gas Industry – NYTimes.com.

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