The Center for Economic Policy Research asks whether happier workers bring a corporation higher profits. They find the case ambiguous, at least scientifically, but for decades now "cost-benefit analyses" have only measured the "cost" to corporations when we make them do the right thing, and corporations these days seem dedicated only to maximizing short-term economic gain, which they can now get without actually doing (or even investing in) any worthwhile work at all. The social scientists may develop the research tools to prove that happiness-is-profitable-too, but I find the moral case for happier workers quite sufficient.
The Center for Effective Government finds that seven of America's 30 largest corporations actually paid their CEOs more than they paid our government in taxes. In other words, you have every right to suspect that when CEOs say they need to pay less in taxes so they can invest in jobs, what they really mean is that they need to pay less in taxes so they can pay themselves more. The return of the 91% tax bracket on millionaire income sure would come in handy right about now.
Major polluters join out-of-state Attorneys General and legislators to sue the EPA for its Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan. From the sound of it, a sane society would call this a "frivolous lawsuit" -- far from handing a mandate down from Mt. Sinai, the EPA worked with states to craft a cleanup plan, and it's an open question whether the folks filing the suit even have standing to sue (only one state involved in the cleanup plan, West Virginia, has joined the suit). And when you hear politicians talking about "states' rights" in this context, you have every right to wonder whether they're really talking about corporations' "rights."
Pope Francis I tells a multifaith traditional-marriage conference that "children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother." No use parsing his words to ask if he really meant "a family should be able to teach how masculinity and femininity can work together" -- you can hardly expect the Pope to abandon millenia of tradition (rank-and-file Catholics can do that more easily, which is as it should be). Still, gay marriage doesn't evoke "the culture of the temporary," or else it wouldn't be about, you know, marriage.
Finally, exit polls indicate that white evangelical Christians actually made up the same proportion of the electorate in 2014 as they did in 2012 and 2010. And voted more or less the same way, too, though you expected that. Further, white evangelicals made up roughly the same proportion of voters in 2008 and 2006, too, but broke harder for Democrats in those years, especially in 2006. In other words, perhaps we should look elsewhere to figure out how Democrats did so badly -- starting with weakness when in office, I should think.
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