Oh yes, it’s definitely D.C., now the richest metropolitan area in the U.S. And in case you were wondering, here’s the cause:
D.C.’s prosperity reflects a parasite economy that battens on wealth created by others. We live in a vast, metastasizing tick of a city, swollen on the lifeblood it drains from the body politic.
Why did I move to the D.C. area again? Oh yeah, I’m supposed to help keep this from happening. I feel so productive…
SI’s Tom Verducci on Tony LaRussa’s management of World Series Game 5:
Marie Curie died of anemia caused by her exposure to the radioactive elements she discovered. Jim Fixx wrote The Complete Book of Running to promote its health benefits, and dropped dead at 52 from a heart attack after a daily run. Now here is La Russa desperate for two wins to keep the monster he invented from turning against his reputation.
One more reason to love sports: commenters can make ridiculously outlandish comparisons that politicians could never get away with. (Rush Limbaugh and Hank Williams Jr. exceptions noted.)
Don’t like the way a particular sector of your economy is evolving… say taxicabs in DC, for example? No problem:
What could go wrong?
If this works, I say we ban all food, then just lift the ban one government-approved cuisine at a time.
Apparently calling the U.S. tax code “byzantine” is an insult to Byzantium:
Was Byzantium’s tax code Byzantine? Not at all. Byzantium’s two-pronged system would have made Steve Forbes proud. There was a flat tax on all citizens. Farmers paid an additional tax based on the size and quality of their land and their annual production. While the equation was straightforward, putting it to work was not. The Byzantines used alphabetic, rather than Arabic, numerals that were notoriously difficult to crunch.
