Under the Government’s Wing
Here they go again: Bills have been introduced by Sen. William A. Walaska (D-Dist. 30, Warwick) to increase medical insurance coverage for hearing aids and to require insurance coverage for surgery and services associated with hearing aid implants. Without a doubt, hearing loss increases the difficulty of one’s life. So does poor eye sight and…
Beyond her many ways of saying “raising taxes” without saying “raising taxes,” note the convoluted language that this advocate of poverty uses to confuse voters (emphasis added): Kate Brewster, executive director of the Poverty Institute in Providence, which analyzes tax and budget policies on behalf of low-income people, said, “State leaders need to take a…
Be sure to listen to this 49 second Allison Gaito report on federal funding for disaster relief. As if striving to outdo Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s bumbling use of metaphor, Congressman Patrick Kennedy declares: What is more important than having the President here is having his money here. I’m surprised the local media hasn’t made more…
One gets the sense, watching state and national politicians in action, that paying for things is by far a secondary or tertiary consideration. As Ed Achorn puts it: The government will borrow 40 cents of every dollar it spends this year. Under the most optimistic scenarios, borrowing will continue at historically high levels, putting a…
Andrew Biggs reviews the reckless state of our national entitlement, with this bit pointing toward something that I’ve been thinking might be the wisest approach, financially and socially: Meanwhile, New Zealand offers a flat universal benefit to all retirees, with voluntary “Kiwi Saver” retirement accounts providing additional income. Such a setup would be a significant…
Big Business learns that Big Government giveth and taketh away: On Capitol Hill and in the White House on Monday, Democrats were fuming over a series of announcements that started Friday from Fortune 500 firms saying their bottom lines will take huge negative hits because of changes in tax law mandated by Obamacare. That hit…
I concur with Marc that seeking to compensate for horrendous government spending, taxing, and economic policies by squeezing money from non-profits would be shameful. We shouldn’t let the news cycle revolve, however, without noting the significant overlap between the non-profit community and the segment of the population that advocates for the very policies that are…
“Desperate times call for desperate measures”, right? So now we learn that the RI General Assembly is looking at taxing non-profits to earn more “revenue.” The method will be via suspension of the tax-exempt status by removing the sales tax waiver that non-profits receive (the GA isn’t considering property taxes or taxing donations…yet). According to…
It seems like such a small step, and obvious, too: Students and families who borrow money to help pay for college will see sweeping changes as a result of federal legislation approved by the House on Sunday night. Although the bill was focused mainly on health care, it contains key provisions involving loans for higher…
This thought, from a review of a posthumous book by Jean-Francois Revel by David Pryce-Jones (subscription required), strikes me as particularly timely, today: A couple of years after Furet’s book, six equally reputable scholars published The Black Book of Communism, detailing how the experiment of Communism had cost about a hundred million helpless people their…