When eternity is not enough. From the Washington Times (July 5): “A forthcoming study for the National Federation of Priests’ Councils, a group based in Chicago, found that celibacy and loneliness were the main reasons why a sample of 72 priests, most of them younger, had left the church since 1992. Many also felt a lack of appreciation.”
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according to Dahlia Lithwick, reporting on the Supreme Court’s year in Slate (July 6): “This virtuous, self-denying paragon of judicial restraint has gorged and stuffed itself on constitutional cheesecake, somehow all the while insisting that it’s on a diet.” The hypocrisy of Bush v. Gore makes it easy to forget that “this same court that barred Congress in half a dozen ways this year from promulgating rules to protect civil rights beneficently made itself the bestower of individual rights in several other cases, including the astonishing case of Kyllo v. United States (giving us the right to grow pot and grill indoors free from warrantless uses of thermal imaging devices).”
The Great Bicoastal Subsidy turns out to be the home-mortgage-interest deduction, according to a July study, “The Spatial Distribution of Housing-Related Tax Benefits in the United States,” written by real estate professors at the Wharton School and published by the Brookings Institution (www.brookings.edu/es/urban). The benefits of favorable federal tax treatment of housing are concentrated “almost exclusively along the California coast and in the Northeast from Washington, DC, to Boston.” The program also “effectively transfers just over $18 billion from census tracts in cities to those outside cities,” though not everywhere. Surprisingly, “in over half the states, the transfers go the other direction–from suburban tracts to city tracts–albeit at much lower levels.” In Illinois, suburbs get about $1.4 billion a year extra; in Wisconsin and Indiana, cities are favored by $179 million and $453 million respectively.
