The Poor Tax pt 2.
I’m going to use this title for an ongoing series of posts that make note of the various and mostly unnoticed ways that our society rewards those who already have, and punishes those who don’t.
Talking with a client today about tax deductions, I mentioned that medicine is a tax deduction, but only if it’s prescription.
People with no insurance are more likely to treat their illnesses with over the counter medication, and often this works just fine. But they are not going to get the deduction. But someone fortunate enough to have insurance is going to be rewarded by getting their medication via prescription.
So basically there’s an “in” group. Once you are in, things get cheaper for you. But if you actually need things to be cheap for you it can be very difficult for you to break into the in group.
The Banana Republic Formerly Known as Detroit
Crazy story today in the free press says that the Detroit Public School system was looted for $57M.
Read the story. It’s shameful and ghetto.
FBI raids Christianist Terror Cells in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana
FBI raids in Washtenaw, Lenawee counties tied to Michigan militia group – AnnArbor.com.
Ain’t that the truth
Galbraith is pissed
James K. Galbraith is really not happy with Alan Greenspan’s attempt at explaining the crisis:
The most telling omission in this paper is that the word “fraud” does not appear. But the world knows that the collapse of the financial system had, at its core, the largest financial fraud of all time. That fraud was in the origination, the rating, the underwriting and the issuance of credit default swaps against sub-prime mortgages issued largely by private originators and securitized by the largest banks.
National Journal Online — Economy Experts — Maestro Looks Back.
Past glory lost through urban neglect
Detroit isn’t the only major city with a big, beautiful train station that has been allowed to decay.
Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball » INFRASTRUCTURIST
WordPress “Press This” feature not working
So, I tried and tried and could not get the “Press This” feature of wordpress to work. Finally found a simple and perfect solution here. Many thanks to the author.
Note that the text he gives as the solution is not something you edit in your press-this.php file, it’s the actual text of the bookmark.
The incoherent right pt. 472
Examples of just how incoherent the right-wing has become are coming in by the minute. Michelle Bachmann has a great quote:
"It is really quite sobering what has happened. From 100% of our economy was private prior to September of 2008, but as of Tuesday, the federal government has now taken ownership or control of 51% of the private economy."
Words don’t mean anything on the right anymore. There is only a flailing effort to shift the rhetoric to jibber-jabber that works from jibber-jabber that didn’t.
Sorry, Sinead
I really think this country owes Sinead O’Connor an apology. Remember back when she ripped up that picture of the Pope on SNL? This country lost their damn minds. There was pretty much no discussion regarding what her protest was about. She committed sacrilidge, insulted the biggest religious organization in the country, blah blah blah. She got booed off stage at her next concert and faced repeated comments that she should just stay out of America altogether.
Well, she was protesting child abuse within the Roman Catholic church…18 years ago! So, it turns out she was right all along. She’s a better person than I am, because I’d have held a press conference by now just to give those folks a big Fuck You.
Forget the homos, hide your kids from Pastor Bob
Should we entrust children to the care of the devoutly religious?
From the article:
Donna Eshuys and Stephen Smallbone of Griffith University in Australia assessed 111 incarcerated adult male sexual offenders. They categorised them as either atheists, religious dropouts, new converts, and lifelong religious stayers.
Surprisingly, they found that this last group (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offence convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. This relationship persisted after controlling for other factors that might explain it.
A similar study comes from Israel, and looked at Jewish male prisoners. As in the UK, religious individuals were rarer in prison than in wider society (by religious they mean orthodox observant Jews, who made up 3.75% of the prison population, compared with 20% of the general population). However, those religious Jews who were in prison were more likely to be in for sex crimes.
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