Like milking a rattlesnake. “You don’t have to expand gambling in Illinois to raise more tax money,” says University of Illinois business professor John Kindt in a recent university press release. “Just raise the taxes on casinos in operation, and you’ll get revenues right away.” Nevertheless, he thinks everyone would be better off if gambling were recriminalized.
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Straight talk you won’t hear from the governor–or any other elected official. “As long as full power over what housing can be built in a community resides with its local government, we are not going to see much additional affordable housing created in the suburbs,” said Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution in a May 29 speech (brookings.edu/views/speeches/downs/20030529_downs.htm). Home owners in the suburbs, he says, vociferously oppose any measures they think might reduce the value of their property. “Yet that is where most growth of jobs and population is occurring. So that is where society most needs additional affordable units….Breaking this impasse will require shifting some of the decision-making power over where housing is built to other levels besides suburban local governments.”
And then Ronald McDonald forced them to drive into McDonald’s and order a cheeseburger with extra bacon. Public health activists and academics Anthony Robbins, Wendy Parmet, and Richard Daynard write in the May/June issue of “Poverty & Race,” “Eating habits are not principally a matter of individual choice.”
