WaPo Column Asks: "Should Mitt Romney Be Able to Use Fund Managers' Tax Break to Buy Filet Mignon?" →

No, that actually is not what the column asked. The question was instead whether people on TANF or food stamps should be able to buy steak or spend their money in other ways that politicians consider lavish.

It seems that if we think the government has a right to dictate people's spending habits based on giving them $1,600 a year in food stamps (the average benefit per recipient), there should also be a case for dictating their spending habits if we give them thousands of times as much in tax breaks, as would be the case with the fund managers' tax break.

For those not familiar with it, the fund managers' tax break (also known as the carried interest tax deduction) allows managers of hedge funds and private equity funds, as well as other types of investment funds, to pay the lower capital gains tax rate instead of the tax rate on ordinary income. In order to get this lower tax rate they have to be paid on a commission, like a car salesperson or a realtor. While other workers who get paid in part on commission still have to pay the same tax rate on their income, because of their enormous political power fund managers like Mitt Romney were able to get Congress to give them a special lower tax rate.

The gains to these fund managers can be enormous; it is not uncommon for successful managers like Romney to pocket $10 million a year. With a tax rate on normal income of 39.6 percent and a capital gains tax rate of 20 percent, this implies a government handout of $1,960,000 a year (@1230 years of food stamps)...

Florida teen charged with felony hacking for using password his teacher showed him →

A 14-year-old middle school student in Holiday, Florida, was arrested this week and charged with "an offense against a computer system and unauthorized access," which is a felony, the Tampa Bay Times reported this week.

The student reportedly used an administrator password to log into a teacher's computer and change the background image to a photo of two men kissing.

Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco suggested that the criminal charges relate to the level of access he had obtained by logging onto the network as an administrator, according to the report. For example, he could have seen the questions for the state's standardized tests, although Green said he didn't actually tamper with anything other than the teacher's PC background image, the report says.

Holiday, Florida's big-time hacker also revealed his secrets after he was caught – the password was the teacher's last name, and the teacher had typed it in in full view of the students. The student told the Times that many other students used these administrators' passwords (their teachers' last names) so they can screen-share and video chat with other students.

Why Is the “Middle Class” Stressed?: An interesting New Hypothesis from Emmons and Noeth →

There have long been a bunch of hypotheses about why the American “middle class” feels “stressed” in spite of constant real incomes and what appears to me increased utility over time as more expenditure shifts toward information goods where consumer surplus is a higher multiple of factor cost:

1. Americans are used to seeing real incomes improve at 2%/year–doubling every generation–and they have not been getting that. Living little better than your predecessors a generation ago is an unpleasant shock.

2. The things that have been becoming cheaper are not seen as things key to your “middle class” status, while the things becoming more expensive and difficult to obtain–a detached house in a good neighborhood with a short commute, health insurance, secure pensions, a good education for your children–are things that it used to be taken for granted a middle-class family could get.

3. The widening gap between the middle class and the upper class.

Now come Emmons and Noeth with a new and very interesting hypothesis: that people who have done better than their parents with respect to education and family structure are no richer, and people who have matched their parents with respect to education and family structure are poorer. In other words, people who thought they were upwardly mobile are finding themselves with no higher real incomes. And people who thought they were sociologically stable are finding themselves poorer:...

Millennials support sex ed but don’t find it helpful in real life →

Hmm, I wonder why...

The great majority of poll respondents said they learned about topics such as sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, birth control and abstinence. But only 45 percent said they discussed healthy relationships, and only 12 percent said they discussed same-sex relationships.

Bingo.

“It’s no wonder so many millennials didn’t find their sex education that helpful,” said Debra Hauser, president of Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that pushes for comprehensive sex education.

“Many were in school during a time when schools taught only abstinence. Others may have received clinical information about disease or pregnancy prevention, but few were provided the information young people truly need to traverse puberty, understand the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships, develop a positive body image, make informed decisions, communicate effectively or navigate the health care system.”

...

“We’re barely getting the basic information out to kids. We’re not getting to the advanced, secondary conversations around dating and relationships,” Tenner said. “I probably know as many adults as teens who say that they’d love to have more information about what it means to date, what is a healthy relationship, how do I know if I’m in one — these are big questions that even adults struggle with.”

Why Pro-Lifers Should Sweat the Details of Abortion Penalties →

How, in his ideal, would Paul handle women who have abortions? Would they face the death penalty, as in Williamson’s utopia, or something lesser but indefinite, as in Ponnuru’s? The majority of women who have abortions are already mothers. Would removing them from their other children serve a pro-life purpose, when so much of pro-life reasoning points toward the importance of the mother-child relationship? What of the children left behind: foster care, orphanages? And the mothers in prison, bastions of rape and abuse, what about their lives? Does it seem sane or restorative to put Purvi Patel in prison for some 20 years because she either had a miscarriage or an abortion? Anti-abortion, in other words, is not necessarily “pro-life.” This is why policy details matter.

Plenty of Americans identify as pro-life, as recent polling work by Vox has shown. But their position is complicated, and rightly dogged by questions of penalties and alternatives. Paul’s mistake is to presume that discussions of abortion penalties issue only from those who are pro-choice. There are plenty of reasons for a pro-life person, like myself, to refuse to support candidates or legislation that favor responses to abortion that are just as anti-life as the thing itself.

The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money →

So the presidents of universities, congregations, and think tanks, other nonprofits are now kissing wealthy posteriors as never before. 

But that money often comes with strings.

When Comcast, for example, finances a nonprofit like the International Center for Law and Economics, the Center supports Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner. 

When the Charles Koch Foundation pledges $1.5 million to Florida State University’s economics department, it stipulatesthat a Koch-appointed advisory committee will select professors and undertake annual evaluations. 

The Koch brothers now fund 350 programs at over 250 colleges and universities across America. You can bet that funding doesn’t underwrite research on inequality and environmental justice.

David Koch’s $23 million of donations to public television earned him positions on the boards of two prominent public-broadcasting stations. It also guaranteed that a documentary critical of the Kochs didn’t air.

As Ruby Lerner, president and founding director of Creative Capital, a grant making institution for the arts, told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “self-censorship” practiced by public television “… raises issues about what public television means. They are in the middle of so much funding pressure.”

Nathan Wood: The Ferguson Consensus is Wrong: What Counterinsurgency in Iraq & Afghanistan Teaches Us About Police Militarization and Community Policing (Lawfare Research Paper Series) →

For interested readers: the latest installment of the Lawfare Research Paper Series.  In it, Harvard Law student Nathan Wood examines the phenomena of community policing, on the one hand, and police militarization, on the other—having in mind an emerging view that the former represents the necessary antidote to the latter.

Certainly an interesting an idea. And we may be at an inflection point, where enough on both sides of the spectrum would be interested to try it, that we may see a few different systems emerge.

In Syria's war, Alawites pay heavy price for loyalty to Bashar al-Assad →

In the Assad regime's heartland, dead officers are sent home in ambulances, while the corpses of ordinary soldiers are returned in undecorated pick-up trucks. 

Then come the press gangs: military recruiters raid houses to find replacements by force for the dwindling ranks of Syria's military. 

Sharing their sect with President Bashar al-Assad, Alawites have long been the core constituency for the Syrian regime. As the civil war drags into its fifth year, the minority sect is seen by opposition rebels as remaining unwaveringly loyal. 

But from inside the community, the picture looks very different: as their sons die in droves on the front lines, and economic privileges – subsidies and patronage – cease, Alawites increasingly feel they are tools and not the beneficiaries of the regime. 

In a series of exclusive interviews, Alawites from the coastal province of Latakia, the sect's heartland, have told the Telegraph of how they are now trapped between jihadists who consider them apostates, and a remote and corrupt regime that told them the war would be easy to win.