That's the view of N.Y. Times columnist Eduardo Porter. Porter would raise them progressively, with smaller percentage increases on the working and middle classes. In this regard, remember that, despite contrary political rhetoric, income taxes are not high. They are at historical lows.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act prohibits debt collectors from attempting to collect debts — valid or not — in various unfair, deceptive, and ornery ways. The FTC's website explains in detail here. And Chris Morran, over at The Consumerist helpfully has boiled it down to the "23 things debt collectors are not allowed to […]
Tom Baker of Penn and Peter Siegelman of Connecticut have written Protecting Consumers from Add-On Insurance Products: New Lessons for Insurance Regulation from Behavioral Economics. Here's the abstract: Persistently high profits on “insurance” for small value losses sold as an add-on to other products or services (such as extended warranties sold with consumer electronics, loss […]
That's the name of this article by Ben Trachtenberg of the University of Missouri Law School. Here is the abstract: Law schools have misled prospective students for years about the value of legal education. In some cases, law school officials have engaged in outright deceit, knowingly spreading false information about their schools. More commonly, they […]
Most airline passengers today are likely to encounter one of two screening machines at the security checkpoints of major U.S. airports — the kind that shows a revealing image of the passenger's full body (the so-called "naked" scanners) or the kind that shows only a generic body outline or simply a box that says "OK." […]
Jenna Rosie Tighe of Appalachian State has written Responding to the Foreclosure Crisis in Appalachia: A Policy Review and Survey of Housing Counselors, 23 Housing Policy Debate No. 1 (2013). Here's the abstract: Existing research on the foreclosure crisis tends to focus on national trends or on metropolitan areas. Few studies focus on rural areas, […]
For several years, the Federal Trade Commission has challenged under the antitrust laws so-called “reverse-payment” or “pay-to-delay” settlements. In such a settlement, a brand-name drug company pays a generic-drug company not to sell a generic equivalent of a drug, thus allowing the brand-name to maintain an exclusive market at a high price for years […]
That's the title of a piece by Eric Goldman of Santa Clara Law School. Here's the abstract: In the past few years, publicized privacy violations have regularly spawned class action lawsuits in the United States, even when the company made a good faith mistake and no victim suffered any quantifiable harm. Privacy advocates often cheer […]
Mortgage servicers are the folks who collect your mortgage payments. Under new rules issued today by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, servicers will have to change their ways. Perhaps the most important change, as explained in this National Law Journal article, is "[a]t the first sign of trouble, when a homeowner has missed two consecutive […]
As explained in this article by Jenna Greene, "the Federal Trade Commission in a final decision issued January 16 will require juice maker POM Wonderful to conduct extensive clinical trials before it can make any claims about the health benefits of its products." And those clinical trials must produce "competent and and reliable scientific evidence" […]