Brian Gongol
Baltimore, short on people willing to teach in the inner city, has gone abroad, recruiting teachers from the Philippines. Incentives work -- if you're a teacher in a place like the Philippines, where the average income is around $5,000 a year, then an offer to go to a place like inner-city Baltimore to make $25,000 a year can be enough to make you willing to do things other people won't.
North Korea, meanwhile, certainly isn't a place most people would be willing to move to...and for good reason. Check out just how bad conditions are there. And why is life there so drab and shortage-ridden? Because the Communist dictatorship is starving its people in order to fund weapons programs.
Get your Security Update for the week -- lots of important information included! And, for your entertainment, why you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet, nor take it all at face value.
Want to know one reason why Iowa's a rough place for small business? For one, we have so many different taxing districts, it'll make your head explode. Try to sell anything in this state, and you'll practically have to apply differential calculus in order to figure out how much to charge the customer.
Now, the folks at Project Destiny want to make life even more complicated for Des Moines residents by hiking the sales tax here by another percentage point. But wait -- there's more! Thanks to the muddling of the state Legislature, this is a special taxing district that could include three counties, not just the city of Des Moines.
But here's the real rub: Approval will only require a majority vote of the total population among all three counties. In other words, if everyone in Dallas County just stayed home on the day of the vote, they could still have the tax imposed upon them by voters in Polk County and Warren County...completely without their consent. Taxation without representation was never so clear.