Neil deMause: The Website

Never let it be said that the journilliteracy watch doesn’t cast its net far and wide. From the Kane County Chronicle in Kane County, Illinois, comes this report:

Geneva High School is taking safety precautions after a threat was found written on the wall of a student bathroom, eluding to violence at the school tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the offending graffiti got away.

In which I examine the business tax breaks in the final version of the economic stimulus bill signed by President Bush, and whether they’ll actually, you know, help stimulate the economy:

The economic stimulus bill signed into law by President Bush today included one tax break for small businesses added by the Senate, but lost another as Congressional leaders bowed to White House pressure to move quickly without adding too many amendments.

The key addition affecting small businesses is an expansion of “bonus depreciation,” which allows investments in tangible property, computer software, or improvements to leased property to be more speedily depreciated, adding to a business’ tax savings. Businesses of all sizes will be allowed to depreciate in this tax year 50% of the cost of an asset put into use in 2008.

The Senate Finance Committee estimates that this amendment will funnel $43.9 billion in federal tax savings to businesses over the next two years… [read more]

I’m belatedly making my way through David Cay Johnston’s new book “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill),” which is well worth reading (and not just because I get a mention in it). I’m only a few chapters in, but my favorite factoid so far:

In 2005, the 300,000 men, women, and children who comprised the top tenth of 1 percent had nearly as much income as all 150 million Americans who make up the economic lower half of our population. Add the income the rich are not required to report and those 300,000 made more than the 150 million.

This growing concentration of income at the top is nothing like the distribution of income America experienced in the first three decades following World War II. Nor is it like that found in Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Instead it resembles the distribution of income found in three other major countries: Brazil, Mexico, and Russia.

Now there’s an epitaph for your democracy.

For more discussion of Free Lunch, see fieldofschemes.com, where I’ve posted about another section of the book - the bit with me in it, though it’s interesting for other reasons as well. You can also buy it at finer bookstores, like I did.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered every school principal in the city to cut $100,000 from their budgets, but says it will have “no impact whatsoever.” Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction:

When Gov. Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg issued their yearly budget proposals recently, they contained a nasty surprise for city schoolchildren: close to $400 million in cuts to public-school budgets, with more reductions planned in the future.

Those cuts will take a sizable bite out of the cash expected from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that found the state wasn’t providing enough money to guarantee city kids a decent high-school education… [read more]

The D.C. city council voted yesterday to approve its worker sick leave bill. Next up, another vote!

The Washington, D.C., city council voted 11-2 last night to approve a bill requiring all employers to grant sick leave to their workers, but the proposal still has hurdles to clear before becoming law.

The Accrued Sick and Safe Leave Act mandates that all businesses within the District provide their employees with leave time, which can be used in cases of illness or domestic abuse or to care for a sick family member… [read more]

Another op-ed in today’s Metro NY that’s somewhat akin to what I wrote for them - it’s not my headline, I know that the economic term “leakage” is a phenomenon and not a quantity of money, and the only time I’d use the word “Gotham” to refer to New York City is if I were covering Batman’s policy positions. (Tough on crime, light on inheritance taxes, I’m guessing.) My editing kvetches aside, though, the topic at hand is an important one: How spending money on the poor gets short shrift as a way of helping the economy.

If you’ve been following the debate in Washington over how to best kick-start the economy, you may have noticed an interesting twist. Along with the usual minutiae about which businesses should get to depreciate what, Congress has been consumed by a debate over whether to increase food stamps and unemployment insurance - not just to help the needy in lean times, but to help the country as a whole.

The issue first arose when the Congressional Budget Office declared that boosting benefits for the poor and unemployed was the quickest way to inject cash into the economy. Then Moody’s economist Mark Zandi - hardly a bleeding heart - said the best “bang for the buck” would be boosting food stamps, generating $1.73 in economic activity for every dollar spent. As a comparison, tax breaks for companies buying new equipment would produce only 33 cents… [read more]

No, I didn’t write the headline, but it pretty well sums up the situation. The New York City Department of Education has new rules to simplify picking schools for pre-K and kindergarteners, and the implications are clear as mud:

The city’s long-awaited changes to the school variance procedure — for non-parents, that’s code for “who gets to pick which school their kids go to, and who has to go to whatever’s the closest” — are out, and parents are already starting to buzz about what it means for the increasingly fraught world of public school admissions. While the new system was first announced last week, two subsequent community info sessions in Manhattan and Brooklyn (the other three boroughs take their turn the next two weeks), as well as conversations with the Department of Education, have begun to fill in the details:

• Principals will no longer have discretion to decide which kids to let in from outside their designated school zone. Instead, all parents will fill out a single form to apply to different programs, listing their five top choices… [read more]