In case you hadn’t noticed, the rich are coming. Upper-income people (those who make 120 percent or more above the median) made up 29 percent of Chicago home buyers in 1993-’94, but 35.1 percent in 1999-2000, according to the Woodstock Institute’s “Home Buying by Income, 1993-2000,” written by Dan Immergluck and Geoff Smith.
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“The best and only sane answer to the threat of terrorism is to leave the Middle East alone,” argues J.L. Babbitt in the “ITEF Review,” newsletter of the Illinois Taxpayer Education Foundation (November). “A withdrawal of American government aid and military forces would force Middle Eastern ‘oppressors’ and ‘freedom fighters,’ ‘free governments’ and ‘terrorists’ to solve their own problems. It would save thousands of American lives by removing the U.S. from a conflict in which we shouldn’t be involved anyway. Pulling out could also return the $90 billion we waste on foreign and military aid in the Middle East every year to the American taxpayers, as a permanent $90 billion federal tax cut.”
New horizons in political correctness. A new handout from the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention encourages journalists to keep the word “suicide” out of headlines, as part of a program to avoid creating copycat suicides. “In the body of the story, it is preferable to describe the deceased as ‘having died by suicide,’ rather than as ‘a suicide,’ or having ‘committed suicide.’ The latter two expressions reduce the person to the mode of death, or connote criminal or sinful behavior.”
