As I’ve been listening to and contemplating the whole discussion around “spreading the wealth”, it’s occurred to me that when the wealth is being spread, there’s more than just wealth that gets spread.

That’s right, the poverty gets spread too.

Of course, calling it “spreading the poverty” might seem too severe, but here’s the thing: people have poverty, wealth, or something in between. If you spread one, you spread it all.

My preference now is to think of it as “spreading the mediocrity”. As we discussed in the past, providing equal access to economic resources (”spreading the wealth”, or “wealth redistribution”) is going to lead to a society that is motivated to meet the status quo, to do just enough to get by, to even lower itself to ensure that there is just enough work to either[...]

The Supreme Court today backed the petition of the Ohio Secretary of State’s position that they did not need to verify the records of about 200,000 new voters this years whose ID information did not match government records. That’s more than 25% of the new voter registrations in Ohio.

Although it’s a fairly partisan confrontation, it highlights something that is becoming more endemic across our fruited plane: in our attempts to ensure that people are able to exercise their right to vote, we are becoming more and more at risk of exposing a larger segment of ballots to fraud.

The problem extends beyond just the sublime attempts to[...]

Anyone that knows me knows how strongly I pay attention to the words we use and understand them by their defined meaning. In my opinion, it is antithetical to accept word usage alone as the means for understanding a word’s meaning, such as the (to me) crass usage of “insure” to mean “to make [...]

There is little need to retrace the Eliot Spitzer story except to say: he got caught with a prostitute and apparently was using a form of structuring (attempting to get around federal bank reporting rules) in an attempt to hide the source and/or use of funds.  Although a lot of hay is being made about [...]

Not surprisingly, Eliot Spitzer did resign today as Governor of New York, ,effective Monday. There is lots and lots of pundit commentary on this today (see Memeorandum). I’m sorry for his family, and I’m glad he did the right thing.
A coworker of mine made a good observation. He said, it seems as [...]

House Republicans made the right choice today when they helped hold the line on Bush’s veto of the bill intended to ban waterboarding.
Democrats are resting on the wrong principle here in trying to protect the rights of terrorists. They are convinced they are on the side of protecting everyone in an effort to do [...]