I’ve been waiting for lunchtime to write this up: Should the government provide tax credits for child care? Or is it “fairer” to just provide tax credits (e.g., per-child benefits) for all families, and let the parents make their own decisions? Let’s talk about taxes. Imagine a middle-class couple. Both spouses work at white collar jobs, but they’ve now had their first child, and they’re deliberating whether Mom should stay home with the baby, work part-time, or go back to... Read more
So says my “2016 Presidential Platform Survey” that came in the mail the other day, and purports to be a genuine survey asking potenial Republican supporters what issues they should focus on. Of course, there may be a modest degree to which it does this, but by and large the questions are loaded, and designed in themselves to elicit support (e.g., “Do you believe that reducing the federal corporate tax rate, now one of the highest in world, will help... Read more
This is purely a parked link, that someone referenced on Ann Althouse’s blog: the Consumer Expenditure Survey, used to determine the “basket of goods” which CPI feeds off of, which I’d been meaning to see if I could find. Read more
So I didn’t actually watch the speech — which is still going on as I type — but worked on the family puzzle in the next room (did the last bits — the next and final step is to find the lost final piece) and idly listed to it. But now let’s read though — or at least skim through and talk about the interesting bits of — the text, from Time.com, one of the first hits. (Fun fact: another... Read more
What is Obama up to? He’s proposing a multitude of programs that have no chance of passing, and issuing veto threats for bipartisan legislation. Does he have a plan? Or is he just being an #*@? Anyway, just an invitation to readers: what do you think? Read more
Yeah, once again, this is a question rather than some actual commentary or information. But here’s something I was thinking about that I’d like your thoughts on. (“You” being defined, as usual, as anyone who happens to read this.) A generation — or, really, two generations ago, there would be instances of families of (to be precise about this) mixed European and Sub-Saharan African descent, with very light skin due to generations of intermarriage, who would “pass as white” —... Read more
Back in the fall, I wrote a longish post on women wanting to be priests. In brief, I criticized women ” for whom the ordination was a ‘thing’ that [they] wanted and a career path [they] desired, rather than a call to serve in a community,” but at the same time suggested that “What is missing in the Catholic Church, and could be a real benefit, is a “Protestant-style” ordination — that is, a means of formally recognizing and commissioning both... Read more
This falls in the category of, “curious about readers’ opinions” — or, really, curious about the opinions of people who think about this sort of thing, whether readers or not, but you take what you can get. There has been a fair amount of uproar, among people who tend to get into an uproar about these sorts of things, about the fact that, of all the “best acting” Academy Award categories, not one nominee was a Person of Color. Now,... Read more
I had written on this before, as part of another post, but I wanted to separate this idea out. Here’s your brief journey into the history of Judaism for the day, courtesy The Story of Judaism, by Bernard J. Bamberger, which I pulled off the basement bookshelf (where books get exiled*), and past reading (and which may not be wholly correct, as I only skimmed the relevant sections of the Bamberger book and am relying quite a bit on my... Read more
For the time being, this post is more of a placeholder, until I summarize the book more fully. But this is a rare book that I actually own, having bought it off Amazon after reading a reference to it somewhere. It was published in 2009, but the data is still relevant. You’ve read various charts on how much the U.S. spends on education (e.g., Megan McArdle’s post the other day), comparing this to other countries, which spend as much or... Read more
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