The tax rebate is a policy made in sound-bite heaven. Forget complicated mouthfuls like phased-in reductions in marginal income tax rates; forget the AMT and the EITC. Just calculate the surplus, and put the excess money in the mail. It’s not surprising then, that the rebate has been the only area of consensus in this […]
Leah Platt
Leah Platt is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.
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Tax Traitors:
In the first days of the 107th Congress, with the Senate split 50-50, minority leader Tom Daschle was optimistic enough to quote Thomas Wolfe’s famous line, “America is a place where miracles not only happen — they happen all the time.” Daschle was referring to a novel system of power sharing in the Senate that […]
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Predatory Pricing:
The biggest anti-trust suit since the Microsoft case is set to open in a federal court next month. The particular complaint is against American Airlines. Three of its smaller competitors — Vanguard, Sun Jet and Western Pacific — are accusing the huge airline of conducting a ruthless campaign to oust them from the Dallas-Fort Worth […]
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Marketwatch
Prompted by a plunge in the Consumer Confidence Index, which hit a near-five-year low in February, The New York Times dubbed confidence the “X factor that can save the day or push the economy over the brink into recession.” Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan warned Congress that “changes in consumer confidence will require close scrutiny in […]
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Dangerous Security:
This week, a bus attack in the heart of Israel — a Palestinian bus driver struck Israeli passengers waiting at a stop in South Tel Aviv — killed eight and left 12 wounded. The government’s response was swift. It sealed off the Palestinian territories by air, land and sea. Palestinian residents are forbidden from entering […]
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Her Life an Open Book
In Charlotte Salomon’s extraordinary Life? or Theater? A Play withMusic–a kind of unbound epic, composed of more than 700 watercolor panels plus text and suggestions for accompanying music–the painted curtains rise on Berlin, 1913. A young woman, named Charlotte, is floating blue-faced in her coffin. She has drowned herself. This exhibit, which features about half […]
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Academic Love
Academic Instincts, by Marjorie Garber. Princeton University Press, 187 pages, $19.95. Why do the French hate the Belgians and vice versa? For the same reason that Yale students emblazon shirts with “Harvard Sucks”: We define ourselves by the distance from near relations. Freud calls this the narcissism of minor differences. In Academic Instincts, a collection […]