The rich? Fuck no. It's truckers. 18 wheelers cause around 99% of the wear and tear on the roads, but all of us subsidize that shitty business model.

And we ALL benefit from it also in the form of lower prices for goods shipped by trucks... Or is your grocery store, d part net store, local car dealership and Home Depot all supplied via the railroad?

You can SEND Amber Alerts from your phone? Amazing.

Then why are owners of eco-friendly cars the ones complaining loudest about such a tax targeting them? They think their wise decision to let taxpayers subsidize their car purchase also entitles them to a discount on infrastructure taxes...

Right, all those "poor" stockbrokers in CT that travel in to Wall Street will never be able to afford the tax.

This tax replaces the gasoline tax for 5,000 drivers. That means they get their gas cheaper, and then write a separate check for their mileage tax. That writing the check after the fact is the thing that will kill this initiative.

At 1.5 cents/mile driven, a driver with a high-milage (eco-friendly) car will pay much more in taxes than the driver of an SUV. Simply put, the driver of a 15 MPG SUV used 3x as much gas, and as such paid 3x the state tax (since they used 3x as much gas) as the driver of a 45 MPG car.

The driver of a plug-in car will (finally) stop freeloading on the backs of customers that drive cars that run on fossil fuels...

The average driver covers 10-12,000 miles year, which means the 5,000 drivers will likely pay, on average, $150/month in "infrastructure" taxes.

In Japan, in Korea, in China they do not have AA --- and their economies are growing leaps and bounds and everybody can attest to their technological achievements.

Got a big 'minority' problem in those countries?

Actually, I realize that all Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans are not 'equal' in the eyes of their fellow countrymen.

We can't end AA for the same reason we can't unwind our crazy sentencing guidelines in this country... Both require politicians to make the change, and to do so opens them up to either racism or being soft on crime, either of which would be a political career-wnder in America today.

That said, admitting students that got 400 points lower on their SAT than the lowest-accepted Asian-American is s disservice to low-scoring student.

There was a debate a while ago about colleges giving 'legacies' preference during admission at the ivy's - that sounds great, make it a meritocracy, until a black alum finds out his son or daughter can't get into Harvard because they are a legacy...

I'm pretty sure this is not about the money. The guy is 71 years old and has is own TV show and his own radio show, plus multiple books. I seriously doubt the money is the problem.

He has accomplished all the above while he was under the oppressive yoke of his Simpsons contract - how much more freedom did he want/need?

The production company said it offered Shearer the same contract as it offered all the other cast members, but Shearer turned it down.

Shearer says he simply wanted what he always had - the freedom to work on other projects.

How can you reconcile the above?

Harry Shearer famously tried to 'demand' that the voice actors get royalties from product licensing - do you know what happened then? Not only did the voice talent NOT get participation in product licensing revenue, the entire cast got a PAY CUT.

Harry Shearer has a history of being the squeaky wheel, tilting at windmills under the pretense of helping others.

Presumably Mr. Shearer was offered the same contract he had the previous 26 years, the contract that allowed him to write several books, have his own radio, TV shows, and whatever else, but he wanted more... What that 'more' was I can not say, only that the production company felt they couldn't give him whatever it was he asked for, so now someone else will voice his characters and collect some fraction of the reported $300K Mr. Shearer was previously paid per episode.

While you may find it upsetting that the FBI had a file on an author, understand a few things:

1) the original impetus for the report appears to be a 'tip' from an informant

2) a number of the documents in the file have to do with a request for a press pass into the White House

3) the resounding conclusion of the 19 pages is that there is nothing to be concerned about

I would hope that reporters that want to work inside the White House would have SOME investigation into their background performed before issuing credentials, and at 19 pages, this was a very minimal investigation.

I find it disgusting that 'law enforcement' wastes time on people who are absolutely no threat at all.

And the way you know who is 'absolutely no threat at all' is what, exactly?

An investigation that results in a 19 page file is a very, very minimal report.

Let's also remember that Feynman had made a habit of 'cracking' the various top secret safes at Los Alamos during the Manhattan project... Besides, Feynman is infinitely more interesting than Mr. Hitchens

A 19 page FBI file is a very, very thin report IMHO.

Henry Ford understood this, pay your workers enough to afford the product they make and you will build a society that is better for everyone.

How is it the Chinese economy hasn't figured this out yet? I doubt many workers at Foxconn plants can afford to buy one of the iPhone 6s they make...

When Henry Ford doubled pay so his workers could all buy cars, did he also build parking garages so they could drive them to work?

Right, because when enough consumers wanted an automobile, that caused the industry to burst forth out of the ground, turning out automobiles and creating jobs.

The guy that sat in the garage, working on plans and building prototypes? He was only doing that because the best available market research indicated that people wanted a mode of transportation that didn't produce feces as a by-product.

You've never actually met an entrepreneur have you.

Then why are the workers being forced (extorted) to train their replacements? Seems to me if the previous employees were so incompetent, their employer wouldn't require them to train their replacements.

People that fly from city to city:

• either park their car or catch a ride with someone else
• pay $100-150/each way
• tell everyone about all the work they got done on the plane
• spend about 6 hours to travel 450 miles
• wind up needing to arrange ground transportation to their final destination

And in 13 years "High Speed Rail" passengers will do exactly the same thing.

The Northeast Corridor runs from Boston, MA to Washington D.C., a distance of 438 miles according to Google Maps. People ride that train from Boston to NYC, NYC to PHL, PHL to Baltimore, and Baltimore to D.C., as well as other combinations. It is subsidized - it does not cover operating expenses.

Not to the extent you seem to think. The bulk of the work out west was done with Chinese immigrants, paid slave wages but they were not literal slaves. The bulk of the eastern portion of the railroad was built in parts of the country where slavery was illegal but the railroads likely employed many ex-slaves.