All posts tagged: business owners

Readers share the state of their local journalism

Readers share the state of their local journalism

Published by skeptic

“It is painful to watch as our once-proud newspaper has become a shell nearly devoid of meaningful content,” one reader says. Homer Sykes / Alamy January 31, 2024, 6:05 PM ET Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week, I asked readers, “What is the state of local journalism where you live, and how does it affect your community?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. Ralph, who didn’t say where he lived, shared a concern that I heard from readers all over the country: It is painful to watch as our once-proud newspaper has become a shell nearly devoid of meaningful content. I keep hoping the local-news business will hit bottom and begin a long, slow climb back, but I don’t see any sign of that yet. I wonder when people will begin to feel a need for local news and be willing to pay for …

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

Civil Rights Undone – The Atlantic

Published by skeptic

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through. Explore the January/February 2024 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil …

The Question the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Answer

The Question the Supreme Court Shouldn’t Answer

Published by skeptic

An upcoming Supreme Court case could wreak havoc on American tax law. But there’s an easy, overlooked way to avoid that outcome. Matteo Giuseppe Pani; Source: Getty December 4, 2023, 7 AM ET The Supreme Court rarely hears tax cases, and tax cases rarely threaten to affect the public at large. Moore v. United States, to be argued tomorrow, is that rare exception. The case raises an issue at once beguilingly simple and oddly difficult: What does income mean? This is a question with ramifications for virtually every area of American taxation; depending on how the Court answers it, Moore could produce a chaotic ruling that casts constitutional doubt on huge swathes of the tax system. But it’s also a question that the Court doesn’t need to answer, and one that it shouldn’t. The issue teed up in Moore may be so intellectually stimulating that nobody seems to have noticed that the case has been fundamentally misframed. The story of Moore starts in 2017, when President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. …

The Real Cost of Driving Into Manhattan

The Real Cost of Driving Into Manhattan

Published by skeptic

Next year, congestion pricing is coming to New York City. And maybe, just maybe, the toll for motor vehicles entering the lower half of Manhattan should be set at $100. That number comes from Charles Komanoff, an environmental activist, a transit analyst, and a local political fixture. It represents neither the amount that would maximize revenue nor the amount that would minimize traffic. Rather, it is an estimate of how much it really costs for a single vehicle to take a trip into the congestion zone—in economists’ terminology, the unpriced externality associated with driving into one of the most financially productive and eternally gridlocked places on Earth. To be clear, Komanoff does not actually think that the state should charge each car, pickup, and box truck $100. He doesn’t think the toll should be anywhere near that amount. “At heart, I’m very much a radical,” he told me as we sat outside a stylish coffee shop in SoHo, to which Komanoff had brought his own coffee in a thermos. He has been detained numerous times …

America Didn’t Need a Recession, but Might Get One Anyway

America Didn’t Need a Recession, but Might Get One Anyway

Published by skeptic

If you were trying to engineer a representative of the mainstream economics establishment, you might come up with Austan Goolsbee. He became an economics professor at the University of Chicago at age 26 and went on to chair Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He is now the president of the Chicago Federal Reserve. So when Goolsbee says that the conventional wisdom on economic policy is dangerously wrong, it’s worth paying attention. Last month, Goolsbee gave a speech criticizing what he calls the “traditionalist view” of monetary policy: the belief that the only way to tame inflation is by causing a recession. This view so thoroughly dominates the economics profession that it is often considered something closer to a law of nature. It is why, when inflation began taking off last year, nearly every economist, forecaster, and CEO believed a recession was around the corner. Then the seemingly impossible happened. The inflation rate, which peaked in June 2022, fell to within a point or two of the Fed’s 2 percent goal, and the much-anticipated recession …