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Highways Are Now Being Held Hostage to Lower Corporate Taxes

by MiltonLloyd Posted on July 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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I somehow missed that this was a real thing, but apparently there are finally serious moves afoot to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. Will this happen by sensibly returning the gasoline tax to its old rate? Don’t be silly. Instead we’re going to do it in least sensible way possible:

A bipartisan proposal, to be introduced soon in Congress, would tax the estimated $2 trillion in foreign profits held by U.S. corporations in overseas accounts….The tax would generate tens of billions of dollars for the federal Highway Trust Fund, which will run out of money at the end of the month. Lawmakers have been in a desperate scramble to replenish the fund, which helps pay for new roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure.

….Supporters said the plan would reduce incentives for companies to reincorporate overseas, a controversial tax-reducing tactic known as inversion that has drawn the ire of Democrats….”These proposals would right the ship, provide a potential funding source for transportation reauthorization and allow the United States to compete on a level playing field,” Sen. Chuck Schumer said.

Hold on. We’re going to take all those overseas profits that are currently untaxed, and levy a one-time tax on them in order to fund roads and bridges? Why would Republicans and the business community support this? Here’s why:

“In a perfect world, you wouldn’t tie tax reform to the Highway Trust Fund,” said Curtis S. Dubay, a tax expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But lawmakers see the need to find highway funding “as a forcing mechanism to get something done” on international taxes.

A “forcing mechanism”? Please go on:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Assn. of Manufacturers have said they opposed a forced repatriation of foreign earnings simply to replenish the Highway Trust Fund.

But including it as part of a shift from the current international tax system — a move that would reduce corporate tax bills over the long term — changes the equation, said Dorothy Coleman, who handles tax policy for the manufacturers group.

….Business groups want changes to the international tax system to be made as part of a broader overhaul that includes lowering the corporate tax rate for domestic earnings as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has indicated that he prefers a comprehensive tax overhaul.

Roger that. The business community is willing to support a small, one-time gimmick that will cost them around $200 billion or so—and free them to repatriate all their foreign earnings and bring that money back to the US—but only if it’s tied to a large, permanent corporate tax change that will save them far more in the long run. Suddenly it all makes sense.

The devil is in the details, of course, and those won’t be available for months. If the final bill is revenue neutral on corporate taxes, maybe this is a decent short-term dodge. If it cuts corporate taxes significantly, then not so much. Stay tuned.

See the original article here:  

Highways Are Now Being Held Hostage to Lower Corporate Taxes

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Attention Parents: Your Neighborhood Matters More Than You Do

by AvisJorisbf Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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A few days ago Justin Wolfers passed along some new research showing that growing up in a good neighborhood has immensely positive effects on future success:

I will start with the smaller of their two studies….The findings are remarkable….The children who moved when they were young enjoyed much greater economic success than similarly aged children who had not won the lottery….The sharpest test comes from those who won an experimental housing voucher that could be used only if they moved to low-poverty areas. Here the findings are striking, as those who moved as a result of winning this voucher before their teens went on to earn 31 percent more than those who did not win the lottery. They are also more likely to attend college.

….It is rare to see social science overturn old beliefs so drastically. It happened because these scholars returned to an old experiment with a fresh perspective, based on the idea that what matters is how long children are exposed to good or bad neighborhoods. But is this the right perspective?

Here’s where the second study is critical. While the conclusions of the Moving to Opportunity project are based on following only a few thousand families, Mr. Chetty and Mr. Hendren use earnings records to effectively track the careers and neighborhoods of five million people over 17 years.

Instead of contrasting the outcomes of families in different areas — which may simply reflect different families choosing to live in different areas — they can track what happens to families when they move….Their findings are clear: The earlier a family moved to a good neighborhood, the better the children’s long-run outcomes. The effects are symmetric, too, with each extra year in a worse neighborhood leading to worse long-run outcomes. Most important, they find that each extra year of childhood exposure yields roughly the same change in longer-run outcomes, but that beyond age 23, further exposure has no effect. That is, what matters is not just the quality of your neighborhood, but also the number of childhood years that you are exposed to it.

A crucial advantage of this analysis is that it follows the children through to early adulthood. This matters because a number of recent studies have shown that interventions have effects that might be hard to discern in test scores or behavioral problems, but that become evident in adulthood. The same pattern of years of exposure to good neighborhoods shaping outcomes is also apparent for college attendance, teenage births, teenage employment and marriage.

This may all seem obvious to you—of course good schools and good playmates matter a lot—but professionals in this field have long believed that quality of parenting is by far the most important factor in a child’s success. This is a popular and comforting notion that Judith Rich Harris effectively demolished more than a decade ago in The Nurture Assumption, but it hangs on tenaciously anyway. Nor do you have to buy Harris’s theories hook, line, and sinker to believe she has the basic shape of the river correct. For example, I happen to think she underplays the evidence that good parenting matters. But not by much. The simple fact is that kids pick up cues about how to act far more from the collective influence of friends, siblings, teachers, TV, babysitters, and others than they do from their parents. It’s hardly even a fair contest. As I put it a few weeks ago:

This means that the single biggest difference you can make is to be rich enough to afford to live in a nice neighborhood that provides nice playmates and good schools.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t make things any easier for policymakers. Teaching good parenting skills may be a monumental challenge, but it’s no less monumental than somehow conquering poverty and making sure every child grows up in a good neighborhood. There are no easy answers. But at a minimum, it’s always better to at least make sure we’re pointed in the right direction.

Source:  

Attention Parents: Your Neighborhood Matters More Than You Do

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Elevated paths give San Francisco cyclists the high ground

by JesusMoorcdss Posted on May 6, 2015

Elevated paths give San Francisco cyclists the high ground

By on 6 May 2015commentsShare

Pretty soon, bikers in San Francisco won’t just have the moral high ground over cars: They’ll literally ride on higher ground.

The city plans to install new elevated bike lanes that will not only keep cyclists safe from speeding cars, but also give them a better vantage point from which to flip off the drivers of said cars. Here’s CityLab with the details:

The city’s Municipal Transportation Agency will oversee the construction of an elevated pathway on Valencia Street in the southern Mission District. The curb-hugging lane will be raised about 2 inches above the road surface, and will measure 6-feet wide with an additional 5-foot “buffer zone.” The city will follow up with a handful of other raised lanes next year, all planned for areas with high rates of bicycle injuries.

Of course, this is already a thing in Europe, where cyclists rule and drivers drool:

Raised lanes are a relatively new concept in the United States, though they’ve been around for a while in Europe. The idea is that by jacking up the path a bit, motorists will be less likely to stray into cyclist space. Cyclists, meanwhile, won’t feel as compelled to ride on the sidewalk in heavy-traffic corridors. It’s a minimalist form of what’s known as a protected bike lane, and one that’s not as in-your-face as, say, defensive lines of bollards or planters.

You can imagine the city of San Francisco is a lot like a mom (let’s call her Fran) with three kids: the jerky eldest (Auto), the quiet middle child (Walker), and the quirky and rebellious younger one (…Bike? Wheeler?), and this is Fran’s way of saying “Auto, Bike — stop hitting each other! And leave your poor brother Walker alone; if he just wants to sit by himself and read, let him!”

Source:
San Francisco Wants to Lower Bike Injuries by Raising Bike Lanes

, CityLab.

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Elevated paths give San Francisco cyclists the high ground

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Tales From City of Hope #13: Badass Blogger Edition

by ArleenFriese Posted on May 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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My white blood count is now up to 2.4. More importantly, my ANC level is up to 2000. ANC is the front line of my immune system, and any number above 1000 means it’s working adequately. So if you’re sick and you sneeze on me, you are no longer likely to kill me. You’ll just give me a cold.

So I’m basically out of the woods. But not entirely. I have months of recuperation ahead, and complete success won’t be confirmed until a follow-up biopsy in 60 days. And then I have a difficult decision about whether I should enter maintenance therapy.

In the meantime, one of my sister’s graphic arts pals whipped up the image on the right. It is titled “Kevin the Badass Blogger” and available in a limited edition to those savvy enough to copy stuff from the internet. For extra credit: can you figure out whose body I’ve been shopped onto?

And speaking of images, last night I thought I’d try to improve things around here by downloading Photoshop Express to replace the crappy freeware image editing app I’ve been using. So I did. But apparently PE works only with a keyboard and mouse. It has no touch support. In 2015. WTF?

More – 

Tales From City of Hope #13: Badass Blogger Edition

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Tales From City of Hope #11: We Have Liftoff

by LawerenHeard Posted on May 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday’s white blood count went from just under 0.1 to just over 0.1. Let’s call it 0.05 growth. Today’s count is 0.2. That’s growth of 0.1.

And that, my friends, is exponential growth. Sure, we could use another data point or three. And some more significant digits. And if we’re being picky, a coefficient or two. But screw that. To this Caltech1 dropout, it looks like exponential growth has kicked in. Booyah!

In more visually exciting news, I know you all want to see my shiner, don’t you? I can feel the bloodlust all the way from my hospital bed. So here it is, you ghouls. As usual with these things, it looks a lot worse than it feels. In fact, I can barely feel it all. But it’s clear evidence that, yes, the bathroom really is the most dangerous room in the house.

1Did you know that the proper short form for California Institute of Technology is Caltech, not CalTech? They’ve been trying for decades to get the rest of the world to go along, but with sadly limited success.

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Tales From City of Hope #11: We Have Liftoff

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Friday Cat Blogging – May 1 2015

by CristinBKY Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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With Kevin concentrating on his cancer treatment, we’ve rounded up some big writers to keep things rolling on the blog by contributing posts in his honor. But let’s be honest: nothing’s bigger on the internet than cats. So in addition to appearances from Hopper and Hilbert, we’re taking this chance to introduce you to some other cats behind the people at Mother Jones.

Today, that’s Olga, who lives in Oakland with Lynnea Wool, our senior staff accountant. Among many other things, Lynnea is responsible for (full disclosure) making sure I get my paycheck. So I’d better blog carefully.

Olga was the runt of a litter of Himalayan Persians when Lynnea adopted her one fine day seven years ago. Since then, they’ve had many happy moments. She just loves to have her armpits scratched:

For a special treat, her cat-mom will put a small piece of cheese—the stinkier the better—straight on her tongue.

This longhair needs regular trims, and I was very impressed to hear about Lynnea’s method. While Olga’s sleeping on her side, Lynnea will cut one half. Olga wakes up looking something like Two-Face, and roams around like that until Lynnea happens to catch her sleeping on her other side. Wish we had a picture of that! But you’ll have to agree this one’s a pretty good consolation prize:

Original article:

Friday Cat Blogging – May 1 2015

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Freddie Gray and the Real Lesson of Urban Policing

by Florine1674 Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post features a simple headline today that encompasses decades of personal tragedy and public policy disaster:

Freddie Gray’s life a study in the sad effects of lead paint on poor blacks

When Freddie Gray was 22 months old, he had a tested blood lead level of 37 micrograms per deciliter. This is an absolutely astronomical amount. Freddie never even had the slightest chance of growing up normally. Lead poisoning doomed him from the start to a life of heightened aggression, poor learning abilities, and weak impulse control. His life was a tragedy set in motion the day he was born.

But even from the midst of my chemo haze, I want to make a short, sharp point about this that goes far beyond just Gray’s personal tragedy. It’s this: thanks both to lead paint and leaded gasoline, there were lots of teenagers like Freddie Gray in the 90s. This created a huge and genuinely scary wave of violent crime, and in response we turned many of our urban police forces into occupying armies. This may have been wrong even then, but it was hardly inexplicable. Decades of lead poisoning really had created huge numbers of scarily violent teenagers, and a massive, militaristic response may have seemed like the only way to even begin to hold the line.

But here’s the thing: that era is over. Individual tragedies like Freddie Gray are still too common, but overall lead poisoning has plummeted. As a result, our cities are safer because our kids are fundamentally less dangerous. To a large extent, they are now normal teenagers, not lead-poisoned predators.

This is important, because even if you’re a hard-ass law-and-order type, you should understand that we no longer need urban police departments to act like occupying armies. The 90s are gone, and today’s teenagers are just ordinary teenagers. They still act stupid and some of them are still violent, but they can be dealt with using ordinary urban policing tactics. We don’t need to constantly harass and bully them; we don’t need to haul them in for every petty infraction; we don’t need to beat them senseless; and we don’t need to incarcerate them by the millions.

We just don’t. We live in a different, safer era, and it’s time for all of us—voters, politicians, cops, parents—to get this through our collective heads. Generation Lead is over, thank God. Let’s stop pretending it’s always and forever 1993. Reform is way overdue.

Taken from: 

Freddie Gray and the Real Lesson of Urban Policing

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Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

by AmosBuiezwtwn Posted on April 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Matt Yglesias says that becoming a new father has changed his mind about genetic engineering:

The main thing is that I now have an instinctive, gut-level understanding of what it is I want for my kid as a parent. And the main thing is that my parental aspirations are very asymmetrical. You want the kid to grow up to be basically happy and healthy. Anything beyond that in terms of genuinely noteworthy achievements would be nice, but honestly not that much nicer than “basically happy and healthy.” By contrast, falling significantly short of “basically happy and healthy” would be really bad.

….Long story short, while I used to think of genetic engineering as primarily about making future generations “better” on average, with my dad-glasses on I think it would be largely about making them more mediocre. You would curtail the left end of the distribution curve, but also the right end. Fewer tortured geniuses and alienated, awkward loners who push the boundaries of society and technology.

The image of the tortured genius is rife in Western literature, but in real life it’s basically a myth. Are there tortured geniuses among us? Sure. Vincent van Gogh was famously tortured. Kurt Cobain. Georg Cantor.

But the boring truth is that geniuses, on average, are about the same as everyone else aside from being geniuses. Einstein was perfectly well adjusted. Ditto for Shakespeare, Edison, Picasso, Maxwell, Newton, etc. They all had their own quirks and foibles, and were maybe a bit more driven than average, but fell well within the usual norms for healthy and happy. Historical studies of geniuses have all confirmed this. Being unhappy just doesn’t have any effect on being a genius.

So no worries on that score, though there are plenty of other things to worry about in the brave new world of human genetic engineering—including the fact that not all parents share Matt’s value system in the first place.

Besides, my guess is that trying to engineer geniuses is a dead end anyway. Artificial intelligence will get there first. By the the time we’ve finally figured out how to reliably produce the next baby Einstein, the machines will just be tittering at us behind our backs.

Link:  

Genetically Engineered Happiness Probably Doesn’t Mean Fewer Geniuses

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The Law, In Its Finnish Majesty….

by DiegoBuring Posted on April 26, 2015

Mother Jones

In Finland, a speeding ticket costs you more if you’re rich than if you’re poor. Fair enough, perhaps. “The thinking here is that if it stings for the little guy, it should sting for the big guy, too,” says the New York Times.

In any case, I already knew this. What I didn’t know was the formula:

The fines are calculated based on half an offender’s daily net income, with some consideration for the number of children under his or her roof and a deduction deemed to be enough to cover basic living expenses, currently 255 euros per month.

Then, that figure is multiplied by the number of days of income the offender should lose, according to the severity of the offense.

Mr. Kuisla, a betting man who parlayed his winnings into a real estate empire, was clocked speeding near the Seinajoki airport. Given the speed he was going, Mr. Kuisla was assessed eight days. His fine was then calculated from his 2013 income, 6,559,742 euros, or more than $7 million at current exchange rates.

Sadly for Reima Kuisla, he was clocked at 103 kph, which set him back a whopping 54,024 euros. However, if he’d been traveling just 3 kph slower, his fine would have been only 100 euros. No matter what you think of the social justice of this system, that does seem like a bit of a steep spike, doesn’t it?

Here in America, though, perhaps we have different priorities. What minor but annoying infractions would you like to apply this system to here in the good ‘ol USA?

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The Law, In Its Finnish Majesty….

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Tales From City of Hope #7: Weekend Update

by 0xo4cdr4 Posted on April 25, 2015

Mother Jones

Since my actual stem cell transplant happened on Thursday, that counts as Day Zero. Today is Day +2. It turns out that part of the prep for the transplant was an IV injection of both Benadryl and Ativan, so I was pretty conked out the entire day. Friday was about the same. Strong stuff, but today I seem to be more alert. For now, anyway.

My white cell count continues to drop, which is paradoxically a good thing. Basically, my immune system will drop nearly to zero, probably around Monday or Tuesday, and then begin rebounding. Assuming nothing goes wrong, the main effect will be lots of fatigue and poor appetite. So let’s hope nothing goes wrong, shall we?

In the meantime, while I wait for a guest post from President Obama, my mother has promised to deliver me a traditional chocolate birthday cake of my childhood on Sunday. We shall christen it the Day +3 cake since we’re not even within shouting distance of my birthday at the moment.

Otherwise, today is busy! Marian is here, doing some laundry while I’m being hydrated for four hours. Later my sister is coming, and our friend Eileen a little after that. Should be quite the party.

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Tales From City of Hope #7: Weekend Update

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