Backdrop: Gabrielle Giffords was shot today in Tucson. So I walk into this taco shop this afternoon to get a burrito. At the ordering counter is a white guy, maybe late 50s, white-haired in a Harvard sweatshirt and horn-rimmed glasses. Seems mild-mannered enough. He’s talking in crap Spanish to the staff, and I recognize that […]
David Brooks has just written approvingly of Obama’s capitulation to Republicans on tax cuts for the wealthy. He cites the most recent Gallup poll’s estimate that 67% of independents and 52% of Democrats support extending all the tax cuts. (In this poll, the average support over all political persuasions was 66%.) But you would think […]
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/12/09/tax-cut-deal-gives-139000-to-every-millionaire-in-america/ — and this chart says it all:
Here are some slides that I wrote on the current UC budget crisis — what it is, how we (and the state of California) got to where it is now, why you (the student) should care, and what you can do about it. My goal is to be informative rather than polemic — the underlying […]
Over the past several weeks there’s been a lot of talk in the media and at the University of California about the origins of the current budget crisis. One of the prime suspects has been Proposition 13, which passed in 1978 and capped real estate taxes by limiting appreciation of the base for property taxes […]
May 18, 2007, The New York Times, “Violence Continues in Gaza”: Two rockets fired from Gaza had landed near Sderot, and the government bused many residents to hotels in what it refused to call an evacuation. Interesting how this headless relative clause doesn’t technically contain the information required to identify the referent, but through pragmatic […]