For most of Mad Men‘s five seasons, Don Draper—the super cool, super successful Madison Avenue creative director—has been something of a superhero, with the seemingly infinite ability to reinvent himself. But in season six, which ended last month, Don Draper has come closer to the edge, as his tragic childhood comes back to haun him […]

Read more

Estimating the actual effective income tax rates that U.S. corporations pay is tricky. Tax returns are confidential documents under strict laws, never released by the IRS for public scrutiny. Corporate accountants and tax lawyers abide by rigid professional codes of secrecy. The information that corporations include in their publicly available financial statements is often incomplete. […]

Read more

Google operates its own system of private buses. The coaches zip up and down the San Francisco peninsula five days a week. The buses are sorting mechanisms. They help re-organize the Bay Area geographically, residentially, racially, between the tech industry’s uber-haves, and the rest who have not the luck to be employed by a company […]

Read more

Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them. Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the same time, polls show […]

Read more

The supply-side economists of the 1980s famously emphasized how government policies (especially taxes) affect incentives. They argued that taxes act as disincentives to work, saving, and investment. Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation repeat this, like a mantra, to the present day. The argument is basically that tax policy—by discouraging desirable economic activities—misaligns private […]

Read more