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Archive for November, 2004

Informed consent

I am embarrassed to say that, after a long day, I often vedge out in front of the tube. Yes, I often read and do other things, but, yes again, sometimes I just sit there, like a drooling, blathering idiot and do nothing but . . . nothing. So last […]

The human zoo

  I’ve been meaning to take a break from writing this blog, to get back to my knitting, as they say, and was well on my way to doing that today, until I read a story about 10 top-rated internet stocks [as of checking the former link to the article on […]

What’s more broken than the healthcare system?

No one in their right mind would argue that our healthcare system is a wonderful system. It is, to be sure, one of the most bizarre systems imaginable — too whacked out to be believable in a Borges or Garcia-Marquez novel, too fraught with damaging outcomes to be believably scary […]

The charge of the flat-landers

Yesterday’s piece talked about the tension between tax simplification and tax fairness, the idea being that treating people fairly tax-wise often involves paying attention to the details of their financial lives, which in turn means adding complexity. So increased fairness often trades-off with decreased simplicity. Let’s take that further down […]

Tax code invisibility / tax code simplification / tax code fairness

We all agree that the tax code is too complex and should be simplified. But some complexity is warranted in the name of fairness.