Teton County commissioners haveraised the possibility of letting voters enact a 2 percent lodging tax come August, to help close a budget shortfall estimated at $3 million.
The idea is long overdue. Concerns about overpromoting Jackson Hole scuttled the tax in 1994, ‘96 and ‘98.
But this is not 1998, and what started as a noble effort to preserve Jackson Hole wound up being a tragic mistake that cost the community dearly these past 12 years...
After 1998, an invention called the Internet allowed people to find out about Jackson Hole without billboards or magazine ads, and hordes of tourists came, anyway. Megahotels invaded with their own built-in promotion. Real estate speculation fueled runaway growth and gentrification, and we wound up with the same problems lodging tax opponents had feared — congested roads, strained infrastructure — only worse, and without revenue to offset the impacts...
From The Last Drug War:
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people...
Matt Taibbi Explains How The Banks Have Ripped Us Off Better Than Anyone:
To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and taking scores, and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don't so much represent national growth and recovery, but something closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash. Many Americans instinctively understand this to be true — but, much like when your wife does it with your 300-pound plumber in the kids' playroom, knowing it and actually watching the whole scene from start to finish are two very different things. In that spirit, a brief history of the best 18 months of grifting this country has ever seen...
WASHINGTON — More than eight years after anthrax-laced letters killed five people and terrorized the country, the F.B.I. finally closed its investigation of the matter on Friday. The bureau released a 92-page report adding eerie new details to its case that the attacks were carried out by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who killed himself in 2008.
Economists Call For Tax On Financial Transactions...
THE great hope of transplant surgeons is that they will, one day, be able to order replacement body parts on demand. At the moment, a patient may wait months, sometimes years, for an organ from a suitable donor. During that time his condition may worsen. He may even die. The ability to make organs as they are needed would not only relieve suffering but also save lives. And that possibility may be closer with the arrival of the first commercial 3D bio-printer for manufacturing human tissue and organs...
The idea is long overdue. Concerns about overpromoting Jackson Hole scuttled the tax in 1994, ‘96 and ‘98.
But this is not 1998, and what started as a noble effort to preserve Jackson Hole wound up being a tragic mistake that cost the community dearly these past 12 years...
After 1998, an invention called the Internet allowed people to find out about Jackson Hole without billboards or magazine ads, and hordes of tourists came, anyway. Megahotels invaded with their own built-in promotion. Real estate speculation fueled runaway growth and gentrification, and we wound up with the same problems lodging tax opponents had feared — congested roads, strained infrastructure — only worse, and without revenue to offset the impacts...
From The Last Drug War:
Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people...
Matt Taibbi Explains How The Banks Have Ripped Us Off Better Than Anyone:
To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and taking scores, and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don't so much represent national growth and recovery, but something closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash. Many Americans instinctively understand this to be true — but, much like when your wife does it with your 300-pound plumber in the kids' playroom, knowing it and actually watching the whole scene from start to finish are two very different things. In that spirit, a brief history of the best 18 months of grifting this country has ever seen...
Some 350 prominent economists from all over the world have written to the leaders of the G20 calling on them to implement the so-called "Robin Hood tax" on the banks "as a matter of urgency".
Two Nobel prizewinners, including the outspoken critic of the financial system Joseph Stiglitz, and scores of professors at universities from Harvard to Kyoto, are calling on G20 governments to back a financial transactions tax on speculative dealings in foreign currencies, shares and other securities of 0.05 per cent – say £500 on a £1m transaction.
Two Nobel prizewinners, including the outspoken critic of the financial system Joseph Stiglitz, and scores of professors at universities from Harvard to Kyoto, are calling on G20 governments to back a financial transactions tax on speculative dealings in foreign currencies, shares and other securities of 0.05 per cent – say £500 on a £1m transaction.
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