Main Street

Interesting Things Around the Internet

• The Chamber of Commerce’s awesome streak continues. Even as the Chamber is out looking for a “respected” economist to sign off on claims that health care reform will kill the economy, more than 5,300 medical professionals have called on the American Medical Association to leave the Chamber over its opposition to reform.
• Apparently 90% of US workers (the ones with jobs) are completely or mostly satisfied. What I find hard to buy is that 30% report being completely satisfied. Somehow I don’t think those 30% of people all go home from work every day saying “I am happy with every single thing that happened at my job today.”
• It’s really easy to give no thought to the fact that Amazon and other online retailers don’t usually charge sales tax. But it turns out to be worth looking at. Not charging sales tax gives them a competitive advantage over other businesses that do, and Amazon’s rationales for why they shouldn’t have to do so don’t hold up.
• Earlier, I wrote about the Chamber of Commerce’s attempt to get an economist to promote their anti-health care reform position. What did a Chamber senior vice president say (in a candid moment) about a previous such maneuver?
  

  “We spent a lot of money to come up with this study,” he told the business leaders. “It’s not what these economic studies say — it’s the cover they give to members who are going to be with us.”

• Via Balloon Juice, this:
  

  The number of Americans who lack dependable access to adequate food shot up last year to 49 million, the largest number since the government has been keeping track, according to a government report released Monday that shows particularly steep increases in food scarcity among families with children.

  In 2008, the report found, nearly 17 million children — more than one in five across the United States — were living in households in which food at times ran short, up from slightly more than 12 million children the year before. And the number of children who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million.

  Among people of all ages, nearly 15 percent last year did not consistently have adequate food, compared with about 11 percent in 2007, the greatest deterioration in access to food during a single year in the history of the report.