0819 by Jeff Hess
Robert Frank writes:
Perhaps the most important reason for the death of the “Death Tax” movement is what might be called the Paris Hilton affect. In 2001, with inequality mostly a buzzword among a few left-wing professors, it was easier to get public support for killing a tax on the wealthy. Many Americans felt they could become wealthy someday, too, so they opposed any punitive tax on their imagined futures. That was especially true in 2006, when Congress took up repeal again and Americans felt newly wealthy because of rising home values.
But in the intervening eight years, the nonwealthy actually became less wealthy and Americans realized they would be lucky to retire at all, let alone get rich enough to become the target of an estate tax. They also resented the rich Wall Streeters and corporate chiefs who lost so much of other people”s money and publicly paraded their wealth.
What amazes me is that this is in no way a rational discussion but rather a matter of marketing.
Can we declare 2009 to be The Year Of Reason?
Posted in Economy | 4 Comments »
0715 by Jeff Hess
Last evening we gathered to discuss the question:
What is the ideal relation between the individual and the State?
If you’d like add your voice, please join the conversation by writing a comment.
[WARNING… I POSTED THE WRONG LINK IN THE EMAIL. PLEASE GO HERE TO POST A COMMENT FOR APRIL.]
Posted in Socrates Cafe | No Comments »
1242 by Jeff Hess
Posted in Comments | No Comments »
0949 by Jeff Hess
Jonah Lehrer writes:
Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There’s the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they’re going and how to get there.
The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Natural settings, in contrast, don’t require the same amount of cognitive effort. This idea is known as attention restoration theory, or ART, and it was first developed by Stephen Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Michigan. While it’s long been known that human attention is a scarce resource — focusing in the morning makes it harder to focus in the afternoon — Kaplan hypothesized that immersion in nature might have a restorative effect.
And yet developers despoilers can’t wait to turn every square inch of woodland, field and meadow into McMansions to line their pockets with gold.
Posted in Environment | 4 Comments »
0929 by Jeff Hess
Christine Rosen writes:
Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn”t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don”t.
And every year the only gifts I give my nieces and nephews are books.
Posted in Education, Writing | 4 Comments »
1537 by Jeff Hess
More than a year ago, then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama sat down with Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe and answered 12 Constitutional questions concerning the office of the president of the United States in general and the tenure of President George Walker Bush specifically.
At the time I thought now President-elect Obama’s answers were brilliant and one of the primary reasons why I gave my support to him.
This afternoon I re-read the interview and I still feel that this was one of the turning points in recent American political discussion. In just 10 days President-elect Obama will become President Obama and we will begin to see if, as I still believe, he is a man of his word.
This document will be one of the measures by which I will base my own decision as to whether or not the Democratic Party can be trusted with the leadership of our nation.
Posted in President Barack Hussein Obama | No Comments »
0853 by Jeff Hess
Jill Miller Zimon says:
You know, I can’t pull out one paragaph or even one sentance.
Just read the whole feckin’ piece.
Posted in Lie And Equivocate, Ohio, Politics, What They Say... | 4 Comments »
