A Lesson in Stupid Tax Policy

American Thinker | by Daniel Salvaterra | July 12, 2009

North Carolina is a state with a huge budget deficit. It is one of the worst state deficits in the nation at $4.6 billion or 21% of the general fund budget for fiscal year 2010. In addition, North Carolina has the 5th worst unemployment rate in the country at 11.1%, and just missed the top 10 lists of the worst states in the country for business.

So how has the Tar Heel State proposed it solve its budget crisis and spur economic growth? Not by cutting spending of course! Governor Beverly Perdue has proposed $1.5 billion in tax increases, much of which will come from taxing online retail sales from companies that have no physical presence in the state. [Read more…]

Information Overload? Relax

The Wall Street Journal | by L. Gordon Crovitz | July 6, 2009

Just in time for summer, Crown Imports has brought back a popular television advertisement for its Corona beer that first aired in 1998. The new one shows a man at the beach skipping rocks into the sea. He decides to do the same with his BlackBerry — a beeper in the earlier version — when it interrupts his relaxation by ringing and vibrating.

The ad addresses one of the key causes of anxiety in the information age: What does it mean that for the first time, information is no longer scarce? We have fast and easy access to the communications and the facts we need, through email, the Web, Facebook, Twitter, text messages and other tools. So now we have the problem of too much supply. How can we escape useless information, unneeded emails and unwanted communications? [Read more…]

Health Care Is Not That Complicated

American Thinker | by C. Edmund Wright | June 16, 2009

It is no more practical to have “health insurance” to pay for prescription drugs and routine doctor visits than it is to expect your auto insurance to pay for your oil changes and tire rotations. But we do.

Consider: if a health insurance type system existed for auto insurance, it would certainly result in those quick lube oil changes costing about 95 dollars instead of something like 29. It would require an army of public and private sector bureaucrats to shuffle mounds of paper with hundreds of mouse clicks to make sure you were eligible for your lube job, that you paid your 10 dollar “lube co-pay” and that the remaining 85 bucks was eventually approved by a Chevy lube specialist underwriter. [Read more…]

The Three Most Important Rules in Business

Success - The Three Most Important Rules in Businessby Chris Banescu –
From my years of experience working for different companies and teaching various graduate business courses, I developed three rules that management must practice in order to achieve long-term profitability and success. Follow these rules, and a business can remain healthy and prosper. Ignore them, and failure is virtually guaranteed in the long term.

Rule #1 – Always Meet and Exceed Customer Expectations.
Meeting and exceeding customer expectations is the most important but often overlooked rule of business. The only way a company stays in business is if the customer is satisfied with its product or service. This generates profit, builds long-term stability, and meets the challenge of competitors. Meeting expectations should be considered the baseline for company performance. Exceeding expectations should be the ultimate goal. [Read more…]

The Ethical Case for Boycotting Chrysler and GM

American Thinker | by Gary Jason | June 10, 2009

In business ethics, the typical way one makes a judgment about the morality of a business action or practice is to consider the facts surrounding it in the light of four major ethical perspectives. These four ethical theories have been the ones considered most plausible in over two millennia of moral philosophy.

The first perspective is the natural rights view, or what I will call the (A) rights perspective. This view judges an action or practice by asking whether it flows from the rights of those doing it, and more importantly, if it violates the rights of others. [Read more…]

How to Work More Like a Start-Up

Inc.com | by Darren Dahl | May 2009

The first thing you notice when you walk into the Chicago offices of Total Attorneys, which provides software and services to small law firms, is the number of people on their feet. Every morning, the company’s 180 employees gather around the office in groups of five to 10. Close your eyes, take in the often raucous banter and laughter, and it’s easy to mistake Total Attorneys’s headquarters for a college cafeteria. But these meetings, which last for about 15 minutes, are more than mere employee chitchat. They are intended to create what CEO Ed Scanlan calls controlled chaos.

The inspiration for the gatherings comes from a process for designing software called agile development, which aims to promote flexibility, speed, and teamwork. But rather than limit participation to software engineers, Scanlan has deployed agile development concepts companywide, in a drive to make the seven-year-old business act more like the start-up it once was. [Read more…]

Rating Your Doctor

Forbes | by David Whelan | May 25, 2009

Last April doctors told 70-year-old Roseanne Brennan that her mitral heart valve needed to be replaced. It’s a major operation, and she didn’t want to take any chances. So she researched six hospitals near her home in Williamsburg, Va. on a Web site called Health Grades. She downloaded quality reports that detailed complication rates for valve surgery patients at each hospital, grading them on a curve based on how sick the patients were before surgery. [Read more…]