The appearance of the new Tax Incidence Study has people on both sides of the tax fairness issue looking like coke addicts trying to line up the facts on a mirror. The arguments put forward for and against certain findings reflect our views of rich and poor rather than a pure view of the evidence. W...

Mississippifarian has much more about the credibility of Scratch Beginnings , and he links to a Freakonomics post that asked five people what they would do if they suddenly found themselves in the street with nothing. One of them was Scratch's Adam Shepard, and all the answers were a shade unrea...

I'm not a fan of gotcha political stories, regardless of who's being got. The story on Norm Coleman's Washington DC crash pad is one of those. Dinging him for accepting landlord leniency just invites counterattacks and ends up lowering the public's respect for all elected officials even further. (Se...

Ohhhh Lisa. Horrible, greasy-haired, bull terrier of a chef that she is, she's still hanging on in this season of Top Chef. Our good friend and blogger Joshua David Stein despises her. Our commenters despise her. Other bloggers and commenters on other blogs despise her. Why? Because she's nasty and ...

I ran into a couple stories recently that call into question both the morality and effectiveness of our private health insurance system. I had meant to research this more deeply before writing it, but it's not going to happen. (Names and circumstances have been changed to protect their privacy.) &qu...

I recently wrote about whether conservatives are truly more generous than progressives, based on research into charitable giving. With the disclosure of tax returns by most figures involved in presidential politics right now, it's possible to look from a different angle. The Bushes and Cheneys relea...

In the L Magazine's most recent "Money" issue, Adam Bonislawski makes the point that striving to become a middle-class New Yorker is a.) hard, and b.) perhaps not worth the effort: "like swimming the English Channel or climbing Everest without oxygen, or translating the Bible into LOLcats." Sounds f...

Over at my grown-up blog, I have a post about how the governor is up to old tricks: Suppose you are in a working family, just barely getting by, in a state where “compassionate� tax-cutters say they are looking out for you. If you’re in Minnesota, you’ll hear right away about a sales tax cut...

Trickle-down economics is really non-intervention for the little guy and protection for the bigs. Freemarketry  works when the casualties in the financial markets are only two million homeowners. But when Wall Street is in trouble and internationally the dollar is attracting the same enthusiasm...

  Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide, [photo: Jay Mallin/Bloomberg News] was one of the mortgage industry leaders to testify before Congress about whether their outsized compensation packages were appropriate given the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market — not to mention the t...