Are body-mounted cameras the answer for transparency in police departments? →

Not a cure-all, and many of the privacy and disclosure issues aren't resolved yet, but, in some ways, a far better situation:

The report found what seems to be a success in Rialto, Calif. Since 2012, all Rialto officers have worn body cameras. In the first year of the program, use of force by officers dropped 60 percent, and citizen complaints declined by 88 percent. (emphasis mine)
...
"Historically, there was no documentary evidence of most encounters between police officers and the public, and due to the volatile nature of those encounters, this often resulted in radically divergent accounts of incidents," Stanley wrote. "Cameras have the potential to be a win-win, helping protect the public against police misconduct, and at the same time helping protect police against false accusations of abuse."

Those are some crazy numbers.

Tax Cuts Still Don’t Pay for Themselves →

The most recent proposal to invoke this topic:

The Tax Foundation released a report last week arguing the Rubio-Lee plan would generate so much business investment that, within a decade, federal tax receipts would be higher than if taxes hadn’t been cut at all. According to William McBride, the chief economist at the right-of-center think tank, the senators’ plan would add 15 percent to gross domestic product and 13 percent to wages.
If that sounds aggressive to you, you’re not alone: I discussed the Tax Foundation report with 10 public finance economists ranging across the ideological spectrum, all of whom said its estimates of the economic effects of tax cuts were too aggressive. “This would not pass muster as an undergraduate’s model at a top university,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University professor whom the Tax Foundation specifically encouraged me to call.

And the problem (again, "dynamic scoring", or, as currently used in Congress, "tell us how you want the results to come out; we'll make it happen"):

This assumption led various economists to invoke the names of small islands.
“That’s true for the Netherlands Antilles, it’s not true for us,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, the former head of the Congressional Budget Office who was John McCain’s top economic adviser during his 2008 campaign.
“It’s a model that might be appropriate for Bermuda,” Mr. Kotlikoff said.
In a very small, very open economy, the Tax Foundation might be right: Cuts in investment taxes would drive a flood of foreign capital, producing a huge percentage increase in investment. But the United States is simply too big for that to work. The U.S. economy also is not perfectly open; for example, we have some restrictions on trade. Therefore, estimates of the amount of investment created by investment tax cuts should be more modest. Economists also criticized the Tax Foundation model for assuming all that new investment would fall into place very rapidly, and for failing to address economic effects from spending cuts or increased borrowing that the tax cuts would require in their first years.

Failed by Law and Courts, Troops Come Home to Repossessions →

Shameless:

Sergeant Beard had no redress in court: His lawsuit against the auto lender was thrown out because of a clause in his contract that forced any dispute into mandatory arbitration, a private system for resolving complaints where the courtroom rules of evidence do not apply. In the cloistered legal universe of mandatory arbitration, the companies sometimes pick the arbiters, and the results, which cannot be appealed, are almost never made public.
That is the experience for many Americans who are contractually obligated to resolve their disputes with investment advisers or lenders in this way. But it is supposed to be different for the troops who are deployed abroad, say military lawyers, state authorities and Pentagon officials.

Health-Care Deductibles Climbing Out of Reach →

Deductibles are an element of any insurance product, but as deductibles have grown in recent years, a surprising percentage of people with private insurance, and especially those with lower and moderate incomes, simply do not have the resources to pay their deductibles and will either have to put off care or incur medical debt.

The chart above, based on a Kaiser Family Foundation study published Wednesday, shows that about a quarter of all non-elderly Americans with private insurance coverage do not have sufficient liquid assets to pay even a mid-range deductible, which at today’s rates would be $1,200 for single coverage and $2,400 for family coverage. We found that more than a third don’t have the resources to pay higher deductibles. Among low- and moderate-income households, even fewer are able to meet deductibles. It’s no wonder that collections for medical debt represent half of all bill collections. The estimates are conservative because they assume that people have all of their liquid assets available to pay their health-care bills. But most people must tap into their liquid assets to meet other obligations, such as their rent or mortgage, car repairs, or educational costs.

Debunking America’s Energy Fantasy: Shale Gas and Tight Oil Peak in Next Decade →

Some key points from Berman’s remarks:

The US is a much smaller player, in global terms, than the cheerleading would have you believe

The EIA (which if anything has a bullish bias) projects that US oil production will peak in 2016

Shale gas production is falling for all US plays except Marcellus, and that is estimated to peak in 2020

LNG export is a bad idea; the US can’t compete with Russian prices

Not to mention, many newer companies are deeply indebted.

Nearly a million protest Brazil's president, economy, corruption →

Close to a million demonstrators marched in cities and towns across Brazil on Sunday to protest a sluggish economy, rising prices and corruption - and to call for the impeachment of left-wing President Dilma Rousseff.

The protests in the continent-sized country come as Brazil struggles to overcome economic and political malaise and pick up the pieces of a boom that crumbled about the time Rousseff took office in 2011.

When a Summer Job Could Pay the Tuition →

Just to put this in perspective, say that a full-time student works 40 hours per week for 12 weeks of summer vacation, and then 10 hours per week for 30 weeks during the school year--while taking a break during vacations and finals. That schedule would total 780 hours per year. Back in the late 1970s, even being paid the minimum wage, this work schedule easily covered tuition. By the early 1990s, it no longer covered tuition. According to the OECD, the average annual hours worked by a US worker was 1,788 in 2013. At the minimum wage, that's now just enough to cover tuition--although it doesn't leave much space for being a full-time student.