I’m applying to law school. I’m sure there are many schools that could provide me with a decent education; I’m less confident that a degree from some institutions will get me a job. In fact, some schools, while charging outrageously high tuition, place fewer than half of their recent graduates in long-term, full-time legal positions. Is it moral for schools like these to keep enrolling students and collecting tuition dollars knowing that their product is a risky (or outright bad) investment?

Read it all from “The Ethicist”.

….President Obama’s call for a return to Clinton-era tax rates is misleading: If the Bush upper-income tax cuts go away, tax rates will exceed those in place at the end of the 1990s.

The top effective federal marginal tax rate on work income would rise to roughly 44.6% from 37.9% in 2012.

That’s higher than under President Clinton because of a 0.9-percentage-point Medicare payroll tax hike for upper-income households, which passed with Obama-Care and takes effect in January.

Tax rates on long-term capital gains also will be higher than when Clinton left office if Bush tax cuts expire as ObamaCare’s new 3.8% Medicare tax on investment gains takes effect. Up to now, only wage and salary income has been subject to Medicare taxes.

Read it all.

At first blush, it seems to make policy sense, too. The rich fabric of America’s civic life, from Boy Scouts to community orchestras to soup kitchens, is the envy of the world. Its diversity reflects in part how much it depends on private givers with diverse interests and motives, and not just on the government. Their giving is encouraged by the charitable deduction, enacted in 1917, just four years after the income tax itself. The deduction lets people feel they are beating the system even as they practice virtue.

But there’s a question of fairness that complicates the issue. Overwhelmingly, the deduction benefits the wealthy ”” and the rest of the country has to make up the gap.

Read it all.

[Emmanuel] Davidenkoff says the Socialist government doesn’t seem to understand the concerns of the working and middle class and in the name of equality, got it all wrong.

“Mostly, wealthy people don’t want homework because when the kids are at home, they make sports or dance or music. They go to the museums, to the theater. So they have this access to culture, which is very important,” he says. “In poor families, they don’t have that, so the only link they have with culture and school is homework.”

Elisabeth Zeboulon sits in her office over the playground. Today, she’s the principal at a private, bilingual school in Paris, but she spent most of her career in French public schools. Zeboulon says the centralized French education system doesn’t leave much room for trying different teaching methods….

Read or listen to it all (audio highly recommended).

The Primate of All Nigeria Anglican Communion, Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, on Saturday dismissed calls in some quarters for Churches in the country to be mandated to pay tax to government.

Okoh said this in Abuja at the 2012 Carnival for Christ, organised by the Abuja Diocese of the Anglican Communion.

The Carnival for Christ is an annual gathering of the various archdeaconries in the diocese to praise and worship God.

Read it all.

The Anglican Church of the Province of Central Africa (CPCA) yesterday said it had taken over most of the properties from defrocked Bishop, Nolbert Kunonga, following a recent Supreme Court ruling.

The court, a fortnight ago ruled that Bishop Chad Gandiya’s faction was the rightful owner of the properties which Kunonga had grabbed.

Gandiya’s press officer, Precious Shumba, said although the CPCA had faced resistance in some of the parishes, most of the buildings had been taken by midday yesterday.

Read it all.

[Crystal] Thompson made $18 an hour as a senior account executive at Daniel Island giftware manufacturer Davis & Small until March, and the 36-year-old single mother hasn’t been able to find suitable replacement work since.

She said she would simply work two jobs if she didn’t have children, but since she has to support her girls, she figures she needs to be paid at least $14 an hour.

“There’s so many people who are unemployed that they’re all going for the same jobs,” she said.

Thompson already moved in with her mother to save money, even though “it’s not emotionally healthy for me and my children.” And if no one hires her this month, it’s about to get rougher.
Thompson is one of 29,000 South Carolinians who will lose their federal unemployment benefits at the end of the year.

After several extensions of the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation program to help out-of-work Americans ride out the recession the past few years, it’s over. Congress passed the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 in February, which cut off the benefits by Jan. 3, 2013.

Read it all.

This morning, if all goes as planned, the new old church of the Episcopal Church of the Advocate will begin its journey from Germanton to Chapel Hill. Built in the early 1890s, the historic St. Philip’s Episcopal Church will take nine days to get here, traveling mostly rural roads.

Blake Moving Company is moving the building, which is scheduled to arrive on Dec. 8. Episcopal Church of the Advocate member Sam Laurent will be there to greet it. He’s a founding member of ECOTA, which, with the arrival of the chapel, will have its first real home.

“We call ourselves a nomadic church a lot of the time,” Laurent said.

Read more: The Herald-Sun – Episcopal Church of the Advocate gets a new old church

Read it all.

For decades, doctors in picturesque Boise, Idaho, were part of a tight-knit community, freely referring patients to the specialists or hospitals of their choice and exchanging information about the latest medical treatments.

But that began to change a few years ago, when the city’s largest hospital, St. Luke’s Health System, began rapidly buying physician practices all over town, from general practitioners to cardiologists to orthopedic surgeons.

Today, Boise is a medical battleground….

Read it all.

The median net worth of American households has dropped to a 43-year low as the lower and middle classes appear poorer and less stable than they have been since 1969.

According to a recent study by New York University economics professor Edward N. Wolff, median net worth is at the decades-low figure of $57,000 (in 2010 dollars). And as the numbers in his study reflect, the situation only appears worse when all the statistics are taken as a whole.

Read it all.

This week we learned of yet another fire in a garment factory in Bangladesh, this one killing more than 100 people. Before the nine-storey building blazed, workers at Tazreen Fashions Ltd. in Dhaka were making clothes for Wal-Mart and Walt Disney, among other retailers. The International Labor Rights Forum estimates that since 2005, more than 700 garment workers have died in Bangladesh as a result of safety violations in buildings. Survivors of the Tazreen fire told The Guardian that managers stopped workers from leaving the building after a fire alarm and locked the doors. Then came a panicked crush; bodies were charred beyond recognition. All this for a job that earned most workers less than $40 a month.

So this is the dark side of “more.” And we are consuming more, for less money, than we used to. In 1969, Canadians spent 10.5 per cent of household income on clothing and accessories; in 2010, that figure dropped to 6.5 per cent. An insatiable appetite for makeover shows and a mainstreaming of the fashionista ideal have coincided with a total transformation of clothing production. According to a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, it now takes “fast fashion” leader Zara two to three weeks to move an item from an idea in a studio to a hanger in a store….

Read it all.

The recession and weak recovery appears to be keeping many adult children from getting a home of their own, and that could have implications for the housing industry’s recovery.

A Census Bureau report released Wednesday found that between 2007 and 2011 there was a steady increase in the percentage of adults living in someone else’s house ”“ and that increase has mostly been driven by adult children moving in with mom and dad.

In 2011, Census Bureau researchers found that 17.9 percent of people 18 and older, or 41.2 million people, lived in a house in which they weren’t the head of the household or that person’s spouse or significant other. That’s up from 16 percent in 2007, before the nation went into recession.

Read it all.

A steep decline in births among immigrant women hard hit by the recent recession is the driving force behind the record low U.S. birthrate, according to the Pew Research Center.

The annual number of births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 dropped 8% in the U.S. from 2007 to 2010 to 64 births per 1,000, according to a report released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew center. The U.S. birthrate peaked during the baby boom, at 122.7 in 1957.

Immigrant women, both legal and illegal, still have a higher birthrate than the U.S. population as a whole. Yet the rate for foreign-born women dropped 14% between 2007 and 2010, to 87.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, compared with a 6% decline for U.S.-born women, to 58.9 births. The birthrate plunged 19% for immigrants of Hispanic origin during that period; among Mexicans, the largest group among Hispanics, the rate plunged 23%.

Read it all.

I listened to NPR yesterday for over an hour back and forth from a doctors appointment.

The entire time they talked about President Obama’s proposal to implement the middle class tax cut now.
Everywhere I turn its middle class tax cut, middle class tax cut…

Except it isn’t but no one thinks about these things.

What is being proposed is not letting the current tax code STAY THE SAME.
So 98% of Americans WON”T HAVE A TAX INCREASE.

Since when is not having an increase a cut?

Anyone you know say I am getting the same number of days vacation this year as last year I am angry I get a benefits cut!

Thirty years have passed since French president François Mitterrand launched Europe’s last great wave of nationalisation, seizing the banks, insurance groups, arms makers and steel industry in the culminating debacle of the Collectivist era.

The whole world has been living in an era of privatisation ever since.

So it seems like a strange step back in time to hear France’s minister of industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, threatening a “temporary public takeover” of ArcelorMittal’s steel operations in the Lorraine plateau ”“ purportedly to save the blast furnaces of Florange and their 2,500 workers, so sacred in the Socialist Party catechism.

Read it all.

President Obama’s re-election and Democratic gains in Congress were supposed to make it easier for the party to strike a deal with Republicans to resolve the year-end fiscal crisis by providing new leverage. But they could also make it harder as empowered Democrats, including some elected on liberal platforms, resist significant changes in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.

As Congress returned Monday, the debate over those programs, which many Democrats see as the core of the party’s identity, was shaping up as the Democratic version of the higher-profile struggle among Republicans over taxes.

In failed deficit reduction talks last year, Mr. Obama signaled a willingness to consider substantial changes in the social safety net, including a gradual increase in the eligibility age for Medicare and limits in the growth rate of future Social Security benefits. An urgent question hanging over the new round of deficit talks is which of those changes Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats would accept today….

Read it all.

U.S. households owe a bit less than they did at the peak of the bubble. But they still owe a lot: $11.4 trillion, give or take a few billion. Mortgage and home-equity debt is still by far the biggest chunk of that debt.

Read it all and carefully look over the graphs.

After six years of declines, lending for so-called Helocs will rise 30 percent to $79.6 billion in 2012, the highest level since the start of the financial crisis in 2008, according to the economics research unit of Moody’s Corp. Originations next year will jump another 31 percent to $104 billion, it projected.

Lending tied to real estate is reviving as record-low mortgage rates spur the housing recovery while an improving job market makes it easier for people to borrow. A rise in home equity lines is in turn helping the economy, fueling purchase of goods like televisions and refrigerators. Consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, accelerated to a 2 percent annual rate last quarter from a 1.5 percent pace in the prior period.

Read it all.

For the first time in decades, a bipartisan consensus has emerged in Washington to raise taxes. But negotiators working to avert the year-end “fiscal cliff” remain far apart on crucial details, including how taxes should go up and who should pay more.

Neither side gave ground in an opening round of staff-level talks last week at the Capitol. As President Obama and congressional leaders prepare for a second face-to-face meeting as soon as this week, the divide over taxes presents the biggest obstacle to replacing the heap of abrupt tax hikes and spending cuts, set to hit in January, with a less-traumatic debt-reduction plan.

People in both parties are exploring ideas for bridging the gap. Without a deal on taxes, there is not much hope for agreement on a broader strategy for restraining the national debt that also tackles the skyrocketing cost of federal retirement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

Read it all.

Justin Welby, a former oil executive, may have hoped to have left the problems of Mammon behind on his appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury, but he could be plunged into an immediate cash crisis.

The Church of England’s pension deficit could reach £500m by the end of this year, putting a huge financial burden on congregations, an independent pensions consultant has warned.

John Ralfe said congregations, who already pay £68m annually to support the Clergy Pensions Scheme’s 24,000 members, will have to find £108m a year if an existing plan to eliminate the deficit over 12 years is not extended.

Read it all.

Hemp, once a major US crop, has been banned for years because of its close association with cannabis. But several states now want to resume hemp farming, and two states voted this month in favour of legalisation of cannabis. Could change be in the air?

There’s an all-American plant that weaves its way throughout the nation’s history.

The sails of Columbus’ ships were made from it. So was the first US flag. It was used in the paper on which the Declaration of Independence was printed.

Read it all.

Tony Dokoupil..likes.the for-profit regulatory model in Colorado [going forward]…

“There’s a ban on advertising,” he explains. “There are cameras that track the marijuana from bloom to end-consumer, so the diversion into the black market is limited. There are extensive background checks on people who are part of the marketplace ”” so if you want to open a marijuana shop, you have to go through an extensive background check.”

Once that model is in place, the consumer side of things might look a lot like Starbucks.

“I think you will have a variety of products at different levels of intensity, exactly like Starbucks,” Dokoupil says. “You might be able to walk in there and in the case they’ll have 12 different strains of cannabis. Behind the counter there might be hash. There might be edibles, like fizzy drinks or brownies. There could be a hot dog wheel turning. You could put THC in anything.”

Read or listen to it all.

Among the many disconcerting leaps of logic taken by the federal government is the omission of food and fuel prices from its measures of the consumer price index ”” inflation. Somehow that doesn’t ease the bottom-line purchasing pain at the grocery store and the gas pump.

OK, so as of Friday, the average price of a gallon of regular had fallen by more than 30 cents over the last month.

Still, that was more than 6 cents higher than it was on that date a year ago ”” and nearly double what it was in early 2008.

Read it all.

Dubai announced plans for a huge tourism and retail development including the largest shopping mall in the world, a fresh sign that the glitzy emirate has recovered its commercial ambitions after a crippling corporate debt crisis three years ago.

The development, on the outskirts of Dubai’s current downtown area, will include a park 30 percent bigger than Hyde Park in London, said Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, also prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.

A retail complex named the “Mall of the World” will be able to host 80 million visitors a year and include over 100 hotel facilities, Sheikh Mohammed said in a statement on Saturday.

Read it all.

In the summer of 2011, after I completed six years of graduate school and internship training and was about to start my psychotherapy practice, I sat down with my clinical supervisor in the Los Angeles office we’d be sharing. It had been a rigorous six years, transitioning from my role as a full-time journalist always on tight deadlines to that of a therapist whose world was broken into slow, thoughtful hours listening and trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of their lives. My supervisor went over the filing systems, billing procedures and ethical quandaries like whether to take referrals from current clients, but we never discussed how I would get these clients. I fully assumed, in what now seems like an astounding fit of naïveté, that I’d send out an e-mail announcement and network with doctors, and to paraphrase “Field of Dreams,” if I built it, they would come.

Except that they didn’t. What nobody taught me in grad school was that psychotherapy, a practice that had sustained itself for more than a century, is losing its customers. If this came as a shock to me, the American Psychological Association tried to send out warnings in a 2010 paper titled, “Where Has all the Psychotherapy Gone?….”

Read it all.

The Tennessee Court of Appeals is considering whether facilities that operate like businesses within a tax-exempted church should be subject to property taxes.

Advocates for a Nashville church argued in the state appeals court that a gym, a bookstore and a cafe on its property “fit the spiritual needs of a congregation,” and shouldn’t be taxed.

Read it all.

There are nine in all–check them out (ugh).

Police say a Massachusetts man left his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son in a car while he went shopping for Black Friday bargains, then went home with his new 51-inch flat screen television and left the toddler behind.

Read it all.

Congressional negotiators, trying to avert a fiscal crisis in January, are examining ideas that would allow effective tax rates to rise for the wealthy without technically raising the top tax rate of 35 percent. They hope the proposals will advance negotiations by allowing both parties to claim they stood their ground.

One possible change would tax the entire salary earned by those making more than a certain level ”” $400,000 or so ”” at the top rate of 35 percent rather than allowing them to pay lower rates before they reach the target, as is the standard formula. That plan would allow Republicans to say they did not back down in their opposition to raising marginal tax rates and Democrats to say they prevailed by increasing effective tax rates on the rich. At the same time, it would provide an initial effort to reduce the deficit, which the negotiators call a down payment, as Congressional tax-writing committees hash out a broad overhaul of the tax code.

That idea could be combined with the reinstatement of tax code provisions that once prevented the rich from taking personal exemptions or itemizing deductions. Those rules were eliminated by the tax cut of 2001. Reinstating them would tack an additional one to two percentage points onto the effective tax rates of high-income households without raising the 35 percent rate, but which households would be affected has not been decided. In all, tax experts say, families in the top tax bracket would find their effective tax rate jump to 41 percent, even though the top statutory rate would remain 35 percent.

Read it all.

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.

He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back….

People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents….

“I am horrified by the thought of this,” said Andrew Vorzimer, a Los Angeles fertility lawyer alarmed that a company ”” not would-be parents ”” controls embryos. “It is nothing short of the commodification of children.”

Read it all.