The Sunlight Foundation looked at the eight companies that spent the most on lobbying and found that all of them saw their reported tax rates drop. This drop in tax rates effectively reduced the taxes the companies paid in 2010 by $11.2 billion. From Sunlight Foundation: On average, companies we examined reported paying a slightly [...]

I want to give the same piece of advice to some apparently delusional people who both oppose and support President Obama: there is no super secret Obama 3.0 just waiting until after the election to strike. Apparently this delusional belief that some secret Obama, way better or way worse than today, will magically emerge in [...]

The editors at Bloomberg have a good op-ed calling for the federal government to raise the pathetically low minimum wage. From Bloomberg: Here’s an unhappy observation about the minimum wage: Congress last increased the rate in stages in 2006, topping it out at $7.25 an hour in 2009, or $15,080 a year. That amount, when adjusted [...]

There is a very common misconception that the reasons America spends so much more money on health care than any other industrialized nation is that we are fatter or we uniquely want to keep ourselves and  relatives alive too long. It is very disappointing to me to see what are basically myths promoted by prominent [...]

Yesterday North Korea decided to test one of the long range missiles and the result was a disaster for the despots ruling the small impoverished country. The rocket disintegrated soon after it launched. In a rare public admission of failure, the North Korea government admitted the satellite on the rocket had been destroyed. Watching this [...]

When it comes to environmental issues, Americans are more concerned about immediate problems like contaminated soil, polluted drinking water, and even the loss of the rainforests than they are about global warming. From Gallup: It would seem Americans’ environmental concerns follow a rather clear hierarchy based on both physical and temporal proximity to us. The [...]

To bring New York into compliance with the Affordable Care Act, Governor Andrew Cuomo had to create the new exchange in his state through executive order. From the New York Times: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, stepping into the national debate over President Obama’s health care law, used his executive power on Thursday to carry out one of [...]

The Government Accountability Office took a look at the federal government crop insurance program and the result isn’t pretty. We effectively waste $1 billion a year providing corporate welfare to very large agribusiness operations. From the GAO: If a limit of $40,000 had been applied to individual farmers’ crop insurance premium subsidies, as it is [...]

President Obama has decided not to follow the example set by President Lyndon B. Johnson and will not use an executive order to ban discrimination. From the Huffington Post: The Obama administration on Wednesday decided not to move forward with an executive order prohibiting workplace discrimination among federal contractors that is a top priority for [...]

About 50 percent of the country thinks that the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act and its individual mandate will be based mainly on the Justices’ partisan views, not the legal merits. From Washington Post: More Americans think Supreme Court justices will be acting mainly on their partisan political views than on a [...]