Here at Via Meadia, we’re considering a new pension plan for our interns. Here’s how it works: The interns put money in the pension lockbox. The staff then takes money out of that lockbox and uses it to pay for lunches. But don’t worry: for every penny taken out of the lockbox, VM will place […]

It’s not just the wealthy who are raising a stink over François Hollande’s tax policies. Small French entrepreneurs are up in arms over his decision to tax capital gains at the same rate as earned income. Calling themselves “les pigeons,” which loosely translates to “suckers,” they’ve taken to Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, […]

The Washington Post has some dire words of warning on China’s real estate market: As home prices have skyrocketed, many Chinese households have gone all in on real estate by pouring years of savings into buying as many homes as they can.But as the country’s economy slows to its worst pace in years, China’s dependence on real estate for growth […]

Current U.S. drug policies have produced mediocre results, at best. Pessimists say that trying to eradicate drug use by making it illegal has failed altogether. Even optimists mostly view the prohibition approach as just holding the line, which is a polite way of saying that we are mired in an ugly status quo, in which […]

In early September, AI publisher Charles Davidson spoke with Jack Blum—chairman of Tax Justice Network USA and one of the world’s premier experts on tax evasion, money laundering, banking and real estate scams, and corporate fraud—about the failure of both presidential campaigns to face up to America’s serious budget and taxation problems.  CD: Let’s turn […]

Well that was fast. Earlier today we were saying how the end of Georgian parliamentary elections was only just the beginning of the story there. This afternoon, the victorious Bidzina Ivanishvili called a press conference to demand that Mikhail Saakashvili step down immediately as president:Winning a majority in parliament and demanding your opponent completely relinquishes power: […]

We’ve previously highlighted the onshoring process that’s well underway: U.S. companies moving their manufacturing back stateside as the relative competitiveness of American workers increases. But it’s not just U.S. companies. Foreign companies are also expanding their business in the U.S., with foreign investment set to surge, according to a new Kiplinger Letter report mentioned in Businessweek. China’s Golden […]

It is a curious fact that in contemporary American political science, very few people want to study the state, that is, the functioning of executive branches and their bureaucracies. Since the onset of the Third Wave of democratizations now more than a generation ago, the overwhelming emphasis in comparative politics has been on democracy, transitions […]

The United States isn’t the only country wasting piles of money on failed initiatives to promote electric cars. In Germany, costly measures to encourage electric car development have been useless, as only 4,600 electric cars are on German roads today (that’s less than a hundredth of a percent of all registered cars). The cars are still too […]

Iran’s Fars News Agency is standing by its story: American rural whites really would vote for Ahmadinejad over Obama. They’re not bothered by the fact that the source for their original story was a fake poll from the Onion. No matter, say the editors of Iran’s Fars News Agency, the Onion‘s poll was fake but accurate: “Although […]