Chicagoania

Would you apply for a racist firm?

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I can’t tell if it’s a joke but there’s currently a Chicago Craigslist ad seeking only white males for a network admin job.

Considering the situation of our economy and the fact that almost every company in the Great City of Chicago is practicing racial profiling when it pertains to hiring, we will be straight forward and save a lot of time by asking that ONLY WHITE MALES apply for this position, since that is whom we are going to hire anyway.

I’m currently job hunting right now. I submitted my resume mostly to see what sort of train wreck this company is. Since I belong to a tiny religious minority and while I have a genetic mix that can pass visual inspection it doesn’t really match classic American racist requirements, I would have to be much more desperate than I am now to really consider these guys for a job. Oh, my tolerance for idiots is also probably set too low.

Unless it is a joke or some sort of false flag operation, this is a company that’s going to have its finances ruined by the upcoming class action suit. Explicit white racism is not something that lends itself to them making payroll for any length of time.

So how would you take advantage of the situation?

Danny Davis My Representative

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When you see the tall buildings of Chicago and hear the history as a dynamic, leading center of industry and innovation, you’d expect that our local representative in the US House of Representatives would embrace measures to keep this sort of talent and engine of growth humming at high efficiency. But instead we get… Danny Davis, our 7th Congressional District representative (D).

Our Illinois districts have been completely gerrymandered so that the south side of Chicago and a slice of the suburbs going west, along with the loop and River North itself, fall into a single district. Here is a map link if you want to see a veritable “case study” in gerrymandering. Thus the representative, Danny Davis, treats the loop with its engines of economic growth as an afterthought and concentrates on the other constituents, mostly the poor, who reside in the rest of the district.

From the latest newsletter, discussing issues raised to Danny Davis:

They have been concerned about jobs, about the economy, about foreclosure, about education, about health care, about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, about torture and Guantanamo, about our policies in Latin America, about immigration, about youth violence, about criminal justice reform, about taxes, about family assistance

While certainly these are valid issues to be raised by constituents, no where is mentioned the types of policies that would keep the Loop, THE DISTRICT HE REPRESENTS, a leading beacon of business. These items would likely include:

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Rose Friedman, “Advocate of Freedom”

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Jay already had a post up. But I decided a picture, and a link to the University of Chicago obituary were in order.

Her most important contribution was the 1980 book Free to Choose, which she co-wrote with her husband, and the accompanying 10-part PBS series. Both were highly successful— the book topped the best-seller list for five weeks — and had a profound impact on public discussions of freedom. At a time when the nation’s confidence was at an all-time low, Free to Choose helped restore America’s faith in liberty[.]

One reason these times are as bad as they are is that even good people are terribly ignorant about freedom, including economic freedom, and what it means, and how it works, and what it means to lose it. Revisiting the popular work of Milton and Rose Friedman, and introducing other people to it who were not even born when Free to Choose was on television, could do a lot of good.

Eric Holder wants the American people, a nation of cowards, as he calls us, to have a national conversation about race.

I propose instead that the American people have a national conversation about freedom.

Amazingly, the entire Free to Choose TV show, all ten episodes, is available for free, here.

You can get a used paperback copy of the book for a penny (+ postage).

I am going to re-read it before the turn of the year.

“Candy” Tax – or how not to raise taxes

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Recently I wrote about incentives and how to review tax programs on these two criteria

– Effectiveness – does the tax program raise the revenue in a manner that is cost-effective and have the lowest level of harm and distortion to the overall economy?
– Incentives – if the tax program is designed to promote a certain type of activity or “deter” a different type of activity, do the incentives actually drive the behavior that the law is intended to achieve?

The photo above is from an excellent Chicago Tribune article about a change in the Cook County (Chicago) sales tax rules which mean that “candy” is taxed at the highest rate (10.25%) rather than as “food” which is at a significantly lower rate (2%).

This tax shows the “down the rabbit hole” elements of tax complexity when incentives and effectiveness go haywire.

From a complexity standpoint, this makes no sense. Lots of items contain flour and are thus counted as “food”, but for the small shop owner, explaining this to staff and customers will be a difficult and time consuming process. For large retailers it likely won’t be as big a deal because this is all calculated by the register.

From an incentive standpoint, this makes even less sense. Since sales taxes are highly regressive, which means that they sock the poor harder than the rich (since the poor consume almost all of their income, and pay a high percentage on food), you could understand how the state might want to exempt food. But the line between candy and food is now blurry and complicated.

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Floating Over Chicago

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floating-over-chicago

Via StrategyPage.

(Jonathan adds: This photo is well worth viewing at its original size, so click on the Strategy Page link.)