Economy and Business
Money to Burn
Someday soon, will all our jobs involve keeping extraordinarily rich people entertained? These days, that prospect doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. "The rich," as journalist Chanelle Tourish notes, "seem to be willing to pay almost any price for outstanding service...
Marshaling Marooned Tax Dollars
Republican lawmakers have largely greeted President Barack Obama’s new spending plan as dead on arrival. But at least one provision has a chance of becoming law: a plan to tax the profits that large U.S. corporations have parked in offshore tax shelters and use that...
A Corporate Apostate
Business schools preach a strict, anti-social doctrine of corporate management that comes down to this: CEOs must be idiots. By that I mean the original Greek word idiotes, which applied to people who care only about themselves and the prosperity of their immediate...
A Super Bad Deal
How about this year’s Super Bowl, huh? You may know that the final score in this nail-biter was 28 points for the Patriots to 24 for the Seahawks. Let me add: minus 2 million for the city of Glendale. Two million dollars, that is. That's the amount that Mayor Jerry...
A Tax Cut for Tax Cheats
If the most frequently dialed federal agency in America can't even answer two-thirds of the millions of phone calls it gets, should the government cut its budget? Congress thinks so. That agency is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). And lawmakers have hacked at its...
A Bailed-Out Banker Lectures about Fairness
Jamie Dimon is annoyed. He’s fed up with the populist attitude that’s sweeping the country. He’s not going to take it anymore. That’s why he recently bleated to reporters that "banks are under assault." Well, not every bank. He was talking about JPMorgan Chase —...
Say It Ain’t So
What should sports fans do when our heroes turn out to be frauds? Maybe you grew up watching Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire breaking home run records, as I did, only to find out that they (and just about everyone else in professional baseball) had been using...
Fudging the Future
I recently mentioned in a column on renewable energy that solar power could generate half of the world’s electricity by 2050. I cited the International Energy Agency as my source. Actually, the IEA is predicting that rooftop, utility-scale, and industrial solar will...
Pull Yourself Up by Your Bread Bags
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama presented a bold economic vision for America. Do we want a country where only "a few of us do spectacularly well," he asked, or where everyone has a chance to succeed? Obama conveyed this vision by telling the...
Not Lovin’ It
McDonald's is scrambling, and I'm not talking about eggs. Your know your business has what image consultants call "quality perception issues" when your public relations team is fielding such questions as: "Does McDonald's beef contain worms?" Thornier yet for the...
