Business US


HP Does the Right Thing…Why Doesn’t Congress?

A breach of HP’s culture may have allowed this ill behavior to occur but it looks like the company is getting its culture back on track quickly:

Hewlett-Packard shoved Chairwoman Patricia Dunn off its board Friday, severing its ties to a leader whose efforts to plug a media leak morphed into a spying scandal that has spawned criminal and congressional investigations.

No matter whether it be chairman of the board, chief operating officer or president of the United States when they break the law, violate basic human rights, then they should be quickly removed from their position.
Waiting for the end of a contract or term of office or the next election is not acceptable in cases of such fundamental violations. That congress has not acted implicates at least the majority senators and representatives as accomplices. It is not clear that the minority legislators as indicated by their seeming compacency are any less guilty.

There are times when the people must take the action into their own hands. We may be facing one of those times.


Price Gouging?

Post Katrina gas prices maybe went up 10-15% depending on where you lived and in most cases they have rolled back down. Nevertheless, cries of price gouging were rampant and continue. But that is gas. If it is some other good like, say, oysters then it is a feel good story:

With two-thirds of Louisiana oyster beds wiped out by the Aug. 29 storm, prices of Pacific oysters have soared as Gulf Coast processors scour for alternatives thousands of miles away. That’s allowed Taylor Shellfish to raise its prices 38 percent in the past month to $40 per gallon of oysters.
“It’s the strongest demand that I’ve ever seen for oysters,” says William Taylor, ……
Prices have surged as much as 50 percent since the hurricane, according to the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association, giving the Northwest growers some relief, even as they sympathize with the hurricane victims 2,000 miles away.

Imagine the outcry if gasoline prices had gone up 50%!
Seems like so-called market forces working the way they should in both cases. It can, though, be a bit hard to tell if the market is really working in the extensively regulated and subsidized oil and gasoline business.


Tax Simplification

Bryan suggests:

If Congress wanted to simplify the tax code all they would have to do is eliminate all deductions other than the standard deduction and the individual deduction. The whole tax form would look like the 1040EZ. They don’t want to do that because they gain power by having people pay them to include special deductions.

Or provide special subsidies, etc.
That the congress critters and their state level ilk have not done this already, as a first step, is a perfectly good reason to fire them all.