Alternet has the article originally from Truthout A Simple Economic Truth America’s Super Rich Don’t Want Us to Know About.

The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The truth is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies actually helps economies and causes companies to hire more and more people, thus lowering unemployment.

I was wondering if i could come up with a sampling of posts on my blog that have made a similar point.

Why We Must Raise Taxes on the Rich August 2011, Buffett Mocks Norquist Idea on Taxes Thwarting Investment November 2012,  Higher Taxes Hurt Job Creators? That’s Malarkey October 2012,  Call Kerry Now: Deficit Panel Seeks to Defer Details on Raising Taxes November 2011, and  How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich November 2011.

This last one is where I decided to stop the list. There is The Wall Street Journal article  1993 Deficit Reduction: a Lesson on Tax Policy mentioned in the post Who Raised The Debt Ceiling. Here is one quote from The Wall Street Journal article.

Reality: Raising taxes on the wealthy is much more likely to reduce the deficit and make more money available to proactively solve America’s problems—and save money in the long run. In addition, it may have absolutely no negative effect on economic growth, jobs or wages.

I wonder how many times this has to be said before the big lie loses its effect.

I wonder if anybody else in Sturbridge has had the need to send a similar  letter to the Town Administrator and the Head of The Public Works Department

This is the third time this season that snow plows have taken out my newspaper box.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but my mailbox is another story. It is on a swing away arm and the box itself is 1/8 inch steel plate.  Not only is the box knocked silly on its arm, but the edge of the box takes a direct hit from the snow plow blade each time.  I have to use vice-grips to bend the edge of the box in order to get the door to open.

In the almost 8 years I have been here, I have never seen it so bad.

At almost 70 years old, I am not sure how much longer I can keep up repairing the damage as fast as the damage is caused.

Is there some distance from the edge of the road that I can expect the snow plow blade to not intrude?  The mail box is already 2 feet from the edge of the road.

Notice that this is only January 3rd.  At this rate by the end of the season, I will have bent back the edge of my mailbox so many times, it will probably break off.  When I lived in Bolton, I saw a mailbox attached to the end of an antique artillery piece.  I wonder if a snow plow would keep away from something like that.

Here is a picture of the type of installation that I have.

Naked Capitalism has the article Quelle Surprise! New Report Show How Outsourcing State and Local Government Services is About Looting.

As we’ve seen with mortgage servicers, and the Out of Control [report] confirms, one of the approaches used by private companies to meet their profit targets is to cut corners on compliance with the rules and with service levels. And when outsourcing is motivated not by ideology or a belief that savings can be achieved, but by service problems, all too often there’s reason to suspect that the legislation that the supposedly underperforming bureau is executing is cumbersome or poorly thought out. In other words, the problem is being treated as one of government execution, when it’s actually one of bad drafting or overly complicated requirements that won’t go away by fobbing them off to a private company.

Read the full report here – Out of Control.

Keep this in mind when your government local, state, or federal claims that it can save money by outsourcing.  It defies all logic that a private company can perform a service more cheaply and also make a huge profit without taking unconscionable shortcuts.  If it were possible to do this, then the government ought to be able to figure out how to perform the service more cheaply by eliminating the profit and doing the job itself.  If a government run service is not meeting legitimate efficiency criteria, then it should be fixed rather than outsourced.  Whatever incompetence was originally responsible for the failure of the government provider will just be repeated in the letting of the outsourcing contract.  Moreover, the outsourcing contract will be used to hide the malfeasance that could not be hidden under whatever sunshine laws apply to the government entity.