The New York Times, September 28, 2009 by Stephen Ohlemacher
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/28/us/politics/AP-US-Social-Security-Early-Retirements.html?_r=2
”A lot of people who in better times would have continued working are opting to retire,” said Alan J. Auerbach, an economics and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. ”If they were younger, we would call them unemployed.”
The Huffington Post, September 24, 2009 by Pamela Samuelson
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pamela-samuelson/google-book-settlement-10_b_296343.html
The GBS deal can’t be fixed by tweaking a few details. Reading through even a sampling of the hundreds of objections to the proposed settlement, one sees an amazingly diverse configuration of opponents and a vast array of problems that cannot be remedied by minor fixes.
-Ventura County Star, September 20, 2009 by Timm Herdt
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/sep/20/proposed-state-tax-would-be-paid-by-businesses/
While acknowledging that the BNRT “represents an extraordinary change in California’s tax code,” Commissioners John Cogan and Chris Edley summed up the commission’s prevailing view in a Sept. 9 memo: “We believe the BNRT is sufficiently promising to warrant the commission’s recommendation that the Legislature and the governor proceed with a public process to fully evaluate the BNRT (and) to enact a BNRT into law.”
-Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2009 by Peter Schrag
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-schrag21-2009sep21,0,6384800,print.story
It’s “absolutely” not a tax system he’d design, Edley said, but somehow Sacramento’s inertia had to be broken. Under the commission’s BNRT proposal, all California businesses would pay a tax, probably about 4%, on their net receipts, which would be calculated by subtracting the cost of the goods they’ve purchased from their gross receipts.
-KCRW, Which Way, L.A.?, September 21, 2009 Host Warren Olney
http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/ww/ww090921trying_to_fix_medica
“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of not changing the basic progressive structure of the income tax. And the package as a whole, looking at all the different elements of it, we think is pretty close to neutral in terms of progressivity.”
-Orange County Register, September 29, 2009 by Brian Joseph
http://totalbuzz.freedomblogging.com/2009/09/29/tax-commission-makes-recommendations-but-will-it-amount-to-anything/22555/
“I can’t recall anybody in particular who supported the BNRT at our public hearing,” Edley said. “But I also remember distinctly feeling each person who spoke for opposing it was not fully familiar with what we were working on.”
The New York Times, September 20, 2009 by Steve Lohr
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/technology/21patent.html
Any market mechanisms that speed up the process of figuring out what a patent is worth should hasten the flow of ideas into the economy, accelerating the pace of innovation, policy experts say. “What you want is a market that can promote innovation and reduce the huge costs of litigation,” said Robert P. Merges…. “And that market is starting to take shape.”
The Oakland Tribune, September 20, 2009 by Josh Richman
http://www.contracostatimes.com/politics/ci_13354829?source=rss
“I think that great dangers to the Constitution are very much in the eyes of the beholder. When an administration is in power that people don’t like, they often find that what that administration does is threatening to our basic values,” said Jesse Choper…. And for all the rhetoric cavalierly cast about over what is and isn’t constitutional, Choper said, few people truly understand what the Constitution actually does and doesn’t say.
The New York Times, September 19, 2009 by James P. Tuthill
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/l20finance.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2
It was a single person who insisted that some of the culprits in our financial calamity not only be identified, but actually be held accountable. It wasn’t the executive branch, or the regulators, or Congress. It was Judge Jed S. Rakoff.
-Dayton Daily News, September 19, 2009 by Tom Beyerlein
http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/crime/should-doctors-be-allowed-to-assist-in-the-execution-of-death-row-inmates-307631.html
Ty Alper, associate director of the Death Penalty Clinic … said, “I think what happened with Mr. Broom should give no one confidence in the process or the people. Mr. Broom had to help them. I mean, the whole thing is kind of ghoulish.”
-KTVU, September 23, 2009 by Rita Williams
http://www.ktvu.com/video/20958350/index.html
“There’s no reason to think what happened in Ohio cannot happen in California. The lethal injection protocols that the state has proposed using in California have no provisions for what will happen, what prison officials are supposed to do, if they can’t obtain access to an inmate’s veins…. We should care because we have a constitution that requires that executions are humane.”
The California Report, September 18, 2009 Host Scott Shafer
http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R909181630/a
The business net receipts tax is a way to implement something like a value-added tax at the state level. Nothing quite like this has ever been tried before. So this is a novel tax instrument relying on advances in economic theory, but it has some characteristics that are similar to sales taxes—it’s a consumption tax—and some characteristics similar to business-income taxes. It can be viewed as a hybrid between a business-income tax and a sales tax.
Ventura County Star, September 18, 2009 by Scott Hadly
http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/sep/18/former-clinton-aide-calls-for-civility/
“Growing emotional as she recalled her childhood in Oxnard, Echaveste said, “I have had other people from other countries say to me there’s no other place a farmworker’s daughter who is of immigrant parents with no education could go from Channel Islands High School to Stanford to Berkeley and go on to work in the White House.”
Daily Journal, September 17, 2009 by Richard Frank
http://www.dailyjournal.com/ (requires registration)
These five Supreme Court decisions, taken together, demonstrate several important trends. First, environmentalists lost all five cases; this was, on balance, a terrible year for the environment. Second (and conversely), the federal government fared quite well in these decisions, prevailing in four of the five. Third, business interests did even better than federal interests, winning all of the Supreme Court environmental cases last term in which they were involved. Fourth, in all five cases the Supreme Court reversed pro-environment rulings by the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals.