Mitt Romney has recently suffered attacks for his tenure as head of a buyout firm called Bain Capital. During Romney’s time there, Bain Capital purchased a number of struggling companies and laid off scores of workers in an effort to turn the companies around. This is, in essence, what buyout firms do. They take over… Continue reading Bain Capital and the social safety net
Are the poor envious of the rich?
Since Occupy Wall Street pushed inequality back into the mainstream consciousness, those on the right have scrambled to mount their defenses. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor tried to defend by emphasizing the existence of social mobility, something that is
Effective corporate tax rates are not that high
I somehow summoned the energy necessary to watch the New Hampshire Republican debate on Saturday. Like the seemingly dozens of GOP primary debates held so far, the usual trainwreck transpired. Jon Huntsman spoke in Chinese briefly to try to show how much he knew about China, not realizing that the nationalists in the Republican party… Continue reading Effective corporate tax rates are not that high
Two different kinds of libertarians
Tim Worstall wrote a response to George Monbiot’s recent article and by proxy a blog post I wrote a short while ago. I do not intend to get into a back and forth between different blogs here, but one thing brought up by Worstall — both in a comment he left on my blog and… Continue reading Two different kinds of libertarians
The new study on value-added teacher evaluations and its limitations
One of the most interesting debates surrounding the Education Reform Movement has been about teacher evaluations. Education reformers operate off the assumption that bad teachers and bad schools are to blame for the achievement gap between poor and rich children, making teacher evaluations an important component of their reform program. Problematically for reformers, the value-added… Continue reading The new study on value-added teacher evaluations and its limitations