With all the rhetoric swirling around the debate over the fiscal cliff and the consequences of "going over," I found this interactive feature from the Washington Post quite enlightening — it enables the user to calculate how the outcome of the fiscal cliff negotiations will affect particular households based on household composition and income. An […]

by Paul Alan Levy The following was noted on the site of someone who posted comments on my article about Patrick Henry College:  Comments: As the Doorbell Queen, I’d like to welcome all commenters. Here are a few rules: Anonymity: I allow anonymous commenting because I have friends in the interwebs who’d rather not be […]

by Paul Alan Levy Michael Farris, the chancellor of Patrick Henry College, which markets itself as a Christian college with strong ties to the home-schooling movement, recently threatened to sue gay students at the school for creating a blog and Facebook page about the difficulties they face at this institution. Farris, who at one time […]

In this column, Mike Jacobson, head of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, describes the efforts of sugared-soda manufacturers to make their products sound healthy even though they are often a straight shot toward obesity. How does a manufacturer do this? It sells pretty much the same sugar-laden product, but, for example, adds some […]

By Brian Wolfman In 2009, the Supreme Court held 6-3 in Wyeth v. Levine that, in general, FDA approval of a brand-name prescription drug and its labeling does not preempt a state-law damages claim premised on the drug manufacturer's failure to warn of the drug's hazards. I wrote an article on the implications of that […]

As you assess whether some or all of the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, bear in mind that the popular notion that Americans are suffering under a high and ever-increasing tax burden is nonsense. That's right: It's just not true. To the contrary, taxes are at historical lows. We have covered this […]

Ralph Nader explains in this op-ed that Congress should impose a small tax on trades of stocks and other financial products, such as derivatives. The tax would never exceed 1/2 of 1 percent of the value of the traded product, with the hardest hit on short-term investments. Here's an excerpt: In the debate over the […]