Another day, another cable news punditoid sticking up for J.P. Morgan Chase as, somehow, a "victim" of Big Bad Gummint. And surprise! Said cable news punditoid, CNN's Erin Barnett, used to be a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs and a Vice President at Citigroup -- not that such experience automatically corrupts how you think, but our cable news elites sure do seem to like that kind of experience for some reason.
Citizens for Tax Justice finds Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker giving a projected $100 million budget surplus over two years to help fund local school districts -- but the aid will be permanent, even if the surplus won't be, and the aid mandates property tax cuts that most folks won't even feel. That's because the tax cuts go across the board -- big corporations get them and folks with vacation homes will get them just as much as folks who are lucky enough to own one home. That Scott Walker sure is a clever servant of corporate power.
German Bishop spends $40 million on renovating his personal residence, then gets suspended by the Vatican. Clearly Mr. Tebartz-van Elst didn't get any of the many memos Pope Francis has been leaving for Christianity lately. What's worse: German taxpayers paid for all of that. No, really -- Germans have been paying taxes to support their churches since the Middle Ages. And that is one more reason we separate church and state in America!
David Sirota instructs us further about the myth that higher state income taxes cause millionaires to flee. He cites the Princeton study in New Jersey from the middle of the last decade, of course, but also similar findings from California. And, of course, he debunks the "finding" that millionaires "fled" New York state from 2007 to 2009 -- just like in Oregon and Maryland, the bad economy didn't cause millionaires to "flee," but merely caused them to become not-millionaires. Jesus Mary and Joseph I'd like to live in a world where we're not constantly playing whack-a-mole with stupid arguments.
CBS News reports on surgeons who own their own medical device corporations -- and who may well be performing more surgeries, using these devices, than they should. Some say such corporations should be abolished; I'm more inclined toward regulating them, as Mr. Steinmann would, but of course my ideal regulatory scheme wouldn't be voluntary.
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