Yesterday’s New York Times featured a story about Raj Date, a Treasury official working to start up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after a spell as an influential financial-reform advocate. (I briefly profiled Date when he joined the administration.) The headline pretty much sums up the lack of news in the story: “Adviser to Consumer […]
Tim Fernholz
Tim Fernholz is a former staff writer for the Prospect. His work has been published by Newsweek, The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, and The Daily Beast. He is also a Research Fellow at the New America Foundation.
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Divided Government Is Going to Be Lame as All Get Out.
With all this talk of the Republicans taking the House, there’s also been talk of the dubious virtues of divided government. It’s undeniable that at least some people will support the GOP because they feel it’s better to have two parties splitting control of Congress than just one in charge. Unfortunately, if their goal is […]
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More on Google’s “Evil” Tax Avoidance.
Responding to my criticism of Google’s tax bill, Andrew Sullivan writes: This seems to imply that the typical business is evil. But even a corporation that wanted to maximize the money it spends on public goods unrelated to its industry would be better off paying as little in taxes as possible and then giving the […]
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The Tea Party Should Be Crazy for the Tea Party to Work.
Brendan Nyhan did a little research, and argues that Tea Party candidates aren’t that crazy — in fact, they’re often conventional candidates. Various respondents suggests that this means the Tea Partiers are pragmatic. But I beg to differ — The Tea Party isn’t pragamatic. It’s just a bunch of Republicans. As Nyhan writes, “Despite the […]
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What Leads the Union.
The New Hampshire Union Leader has a long and storied history as the preeminent paper in the state, known for its conservative front-page editorials and making Ed Muskie cry.* I still have the “Talk is Cheap, Free Speech Isn’t” T-shirt that I was awarded at a seminar the paper held for student journalists when I […]
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Once Again, Ideology Isn’t Good For Business.
The Atlantic’s Max Fisher read my post yesterday on which states offer a good environment for business, and promptly misread it. To revisit, CNN posted a slideshow ranking the best states to start a business based solely on how little taxation and regulation exists in each. I suggested that the ranking was biased, and that […]
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Does a “Dutch Sandwich” Make Google Evil?
It depends on what state you’re in and the age of the farm animal. Seriously, though, after reading this article about Google’s evasion of $3.1 billion in tax obligations through legal loopholes, I got into a Twitter argument with Townhall.com’s Kevin Glass about whether this move is a violation of Google’s famed “Don’t be evil” […]
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Health-Care Implementation Moves Forward.
Today, an organization of state health-care regulators made an important decision. The Affordable Care Act mandated that 85 percent of each dollar patients pay their health insurers go toward actual medical costs, not business expenses or profit, but it didn’t define medical costs. The state regulators voted to strictly define medical expenditures, so that insurers […]
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Ideology Isn’t Good Business.
CNN Money offers us the 10 best states to start a business in, which can teach us that blind obedience to ideology doesn’t make for a smart business strategy. CNN is basically reprinting a report from the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, whose definition of a good state to start a business in is “any […]
