Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (040706)

Free Links:

• Jeff at Credit/Debt Recovery cries “WORM” (Worn-Out Reactionary Media, known to most as The Mainstream Media) in reaction to this story’s outrageous headline (”Woman gets prison for stealing $7, credit cards”) — He’s right; the headline is designed to generate pity from those who won’t read the full article. This woman charged a lot to the credit cards; that’s stealing too. Plus, she had two similar priors. No pity here.
• Memorize This (HT Club for Growth) –

  

  The table shows that the rich play plenty in taxes, and heaven help us if a lot of them decide to stop working, or investing. Specifically, looking at the far right column, the top 10% of taxpayers, those who have Adjusted Gross Incomes (AGIs) of $95,000 or more, earn 42% of all AGIs, and pay $492 billion in individual federal income taxes, which is 66% of the total of all individual federal income taxes. Somebody has to make up for the 41% of Americans (HT TaxProf Blog) who pay no federal income tax at all.

• Only The New York Times Would Fret About Welfare Rolls Falling in New York City (HT Heritage Policy Blog) — Funny, they were pretty quiet when the number of welfare recipients dropped from 1.2 million in 1995 to about 400,000 in 2001, but now that they’re inching down on a relative basis, it’s cause for alarm. Zheesh.
• March Retail Sales weren’t that great compared to last year — but Easter 2005 was March 27.
• U.S. teenagers lack financial literacy, and it’s not improving. It’s hard to pick which individual answer result was the most appalling but my nominee is this one: “….. only 14.2% of the students correctly answered that stocks would have the best growth potential for money over an 18-year period. That was the lowest percentage in the survey’s history.”
• Weekly Jobless Claims Drop Again to 299,000 — and longer-term unemployment is at its lowest level sine 2001. The link is to an AP report in USA Today, because the main AP My Way pages I usually go to “strangely” didn’t have the news when I looked late last night, only 15 hours after it was released, while many other older stories remained.
• A guy gets detained at the airport because the cab driver was worried about his choice of music (HT CEI Open Market) — Two words: earbud headphones.