The Latest

Romney’s Taxes…or lack there of for the public to see

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When it comes to taxes, one can't help BUT think Republican candidate Mitt Romney is hiding something. 

What other reason might there be to greatly limit the release of his tax returns. 

We already know one year, his own admission, he only paid about 14 percent in taxes.  We're now waiting for Mr. Romney to release his second year.

What else could be in his returns that we don't know? We tossed the subject around on RNN-TV.

The Gateway (Well Regulated Edition)

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I've noted more than once that I rarely discuss the Second Amendment with my friends, because I have the somewhat controversial opinion that the plain meaning of words is exactly that, so the regrettable Second Amendment means people can own guns, subject to regulation. I don't particularly care for that, but I don't like equal representation in the US Senate either, and that's in the text as well.

How Then Shall We Live: Education in the Wake of Generation Greed

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Now that the latest education finance data is out, I’m prepared to write a post on the near and intermediate term future of education in NYC (and perhaps elsewhere). Thanks to a couple of decades of retroactive pension enhancements, pension underfunding, and inflating the problem by sweeping it under the rug, it is not a future of “reform” or “improvement” no matter how anyone chooses to define it and no matter what one’s education politics. It is a future of degradation, one I have already described in detail in this post, one that is well worth a read.

Basically, you cannot have one year in retirement for each year worked without getting it at someone else’s expense. Huge if funded over a career, the cost of that kind of retirement becomes devastating if granted retroactively, and that is what the United Federation of Teachers has achieved twice. New York City’s public schools are going back to the 1970s, and this time they won’t be alone, because the same sort of irresponsibility has occurred in much of the country. Although elsewhere, taxpayer underfunding of promised pensions, rather than retroactive increases in those pensions, account for more of the damage. Underfunding, that is, by past taxpayers with future taxpayers holding the bag. So now what? 

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA v. WILLARD MITT ROMNEY: BORING ME TO TEARS

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After 8 summers writing about politics on these here blogs (websites), my fans are encountering my least productive season. Some of them have reached out to me for the reasons why, and I have facilitated with genuine answers: a combination of dealing with quite a few adverse personal issues; plus the fact that politics has started to become boring to me: after a lifetime of community involvement, political activism and academic pursuit in this area (mainly but not entirely).