DMac87

This. How does one tell whether this affects a particular brand or not?

Even more obviously absurd: 15 million animals saved is how many per employee?

Decreasing the company's cost of equity capital...

Also, the city allows buyers to take what used to be a family home (e.g. 4-5 bedrooms), tear it down and put up a 1-2 bedroom house (more modern, more amenities, e.g. garage, sauna, etc). Why policymakers allow this if they believe there's a supply problem is beyond me - on my block the number of bedrooms has gone down by about a quarter in the last few years as a result...

The issue is that the same argument made for programmers can be made for back office & middle office as well, which when added up are much more than 1000 programmers. I agree that the bonus:salary ratio should increase drastically for trading/sales vs other roles, but for corporate culture/uniformity and practical business (need to quickly reduce costs) reasons it's done this way to some degree.

It makes sense when you think about their business - because banks are extremely pro-cyclical, they need an 'out' to reduce compensation when their profits blowup or economy turns. Easiest and quickest to drop bonuses.

Isn't this effectively what, e.g., San Francisco is doing - once you rent out for X days, you face more burdensome requirements?

Yeah, I'd imagine the founding fathers would see today's voting populace as quite educated, relative to theirs...

Any tax on wealth would have similar effects: You own a business with notional value $2M? Pay X% of that each year, whether or not the business generates that amount in cash. You are a retiree with $2M in CDs or bonds, generating your retirement income? Pay taxes on the capital before you feed/clothe yourself. Etc, etc. Yes, property taxes may impact the middle- or non-1%-upper-class more than a wealth tax, and [a modest degree of] shelter is a basic human need, but market-based property taxes are significantly easier to implement (how to value privately-held businesses? how to deal with offshore assets?). Perhaps good + implementable > perfect + unachievable.

How about starting by taxing many people's main part of wealth, their house, at market value (i.e. no Prop 13)? Let's not let perfect get in the way of good..

How so? I understand that doing research on regulation is by its nature political, but that doesn't mean 'ideology driven'. For instance, you may argue from this data that Obama is the most-regulating president in history. Or, as some researchers have done, you may argue that regulation hasn't killed dynamism (see work by Goldschlag and Tabarrok). Data is data, what you do with it may be ideological or not...

This doesn't seem that unreasonable - weren't/aren't medallions over $1M in NYC, which is a factor more expensive than labor, fuel, or maintenance of a vehicle...