“Pledges of allegiance are marks of totalitarian states, not democracies,” Brown University anthropologist David Kertzer told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently. “I can’t think of a single democracy except the United States that has a pledge of allegiance” (reprinted in the “Progressive Review,” July 2).
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Does sprawl deny home buyers what they want? Not according to a national survey of 2,000 people who bought a primary residence in the last four years, conducted last January for the National Association of Home Builders and the National Association of Realtors (www.nahb.org/news/
If booze costs more, fewer people will drink. University of Illinois at Chicago economist Frank Chaloupka and colleagues confirm this commonsense view in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper (number 8702). The key finding, according to a summary published in the June issue of NBER’s monthly “Digest”: “Students faced with a $1 increase above the $2.17 average price for a drink will be 33 percent less likely to make the transition from being an abstainer to a moderate drinker, or from being a moderate drinker to a heavy drinker.”
