Conventional wisdom dictates that those goods which are said to cause harm or impose costs on society deserve a special tax. For centuries, governments have levied these "sin taxes" on alcohol and tobacco, but the list of taxable sins has now grown to include soda and marijuana, with calls to impose further taxes on plastic bags, meat, and even robots and carbon. Contrary to what experts and policymakers tell us, many of these alleged sins impose very little, if any, cost on society, and the harms that do exist can be minimized without resorting to tax. What follows in this book is a discussion of four case studies—on tobacco, marijuana, alcohol and soda—which make the case against the conventional wisdom in taxing these "sins", before concluding that when it comes to taxing sin, it is time for governments to forgive—and forget.
Taxes are an inescapable part of life. They are perhaps the most economically consequential aspect of the relationship between individuals and their government. Understanding tax development and implementation, not to mention the political forces involved, is critical to fully appreciating and critiquing that relationship. Tax Politics and Policy offers a comprehensive survey of taxation in the United States. It explores competing theories of taxation’s role in civil society; investigates the evolution and impact of taxes on income, consumption, and assets; and highlights the role of interest groups in tax policy. This is the first book to include a separate look at "sin" taxes on tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and sugar. The book concludes with a look at tax reform ideas, both old and new. This book is written for a broad audience—from upper-level undergraduates to graduate students in public policy, public administration, political science, economics, and related fields—and anyone else that has ever paid taxes.
A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself. Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.
Document Computing: Technologies for Managing Electronic Document Collections discusses the important aspects of document computing and recommends technologies and techniques for document management, with an emphasis on the processes that are appropriate when computers are used to create, access, and publish documents. This book includes descriptions of the nature of documents, their components and structure, and how they can be represented; examines how documents are used and controlled; explores the issues and factors affecting design and implementation of a document management strategy; and gives a detailed case study. The analysis and recommendations are grounded in the findings of the latest research. Document Computing: Technologies for Managing Electronic Document Collections brings together concepts, research, and practice from diverse areas including document computing, information retrieval, librarianship, records management, and business process re-engineering. It will be of value to anyone working in these areas, whether as a researcher, a developer, or a user. Document Computing: Technologies for Managing Electronic Document Collections can be used for graduate classes in document computing and related fields, by developers and integrators of document management systems and document management applications, and by anyone wishing to understand the processes of document management.
In this entertaining and thought-provoking book, Tony Alessandra and Michael O'Connor argue that the "Golden Rule" is not always the best way to approach people. Rather, they propose the Platinum Rule: "Do unto others as "they'd" like done unto them". In other words, find out what makes people tick and go from there.
Experiencing Personal Revival is a must-have, life-changing self-evaluation and discovery journal for every Christian and a revelational guide for those who are still searching. Each of the six powerful sessions includes an inspiring introduction, memory verse, lesson with related Scripture, and questions to guide each participant through self-examination and personal application. Book jacket.
Thanks to the wonder of the hide, no one starves or freezes or gets sick on the perfect worlds of the Solarian Alliance. Like a synthetic skin, the hide protects and heals, and can transform people into anything they want to be. Nothing threatens this utopian existence until an extraterrestrial message of unspeakable horror is received. An evil race terrorizes the galaxy, and it's coming toward Earth. . . .Into this world, the Solarian Alliance frees Krim, the last survivor of the Beat asteroid known as the Jack and a prisoner since he saw his world vanish into that strange other space known as Ur. Disgusted with this utopia, Krim enlists in a distant fight at the edge of the solar system, the battle no one on Earth may know about, lest it disrupt their perfect peace . . . the Hidden War.
Based on several recent courses given to mathematical physics students, this volume is an introduction to bundle theory. It aims to provide newcomers to the field with solid foundations in topological K-theory. A fundamental theme, emphasized in the book, centers around the gluing of local bundle data related to bundles into a global object. One renewed motivation for studying this subject, comes from quantum field theory, where topological invariants play an important role.
Offers tips and strategies to build a strong civilization, showing players how to acquire technology; decide when to creat buildings, wonders, and projects; and establish military units.
The southern African savannah landscape has been framed as an 'Arid Eden' in recent literature, as one of Africa's most sought after exotic tourism destinations by twenty-first century travellers, as a 'last frontier' by early twentieth-century travellers and as an ancient ancestral land by Namibia's Herero communities. In this 150-year history of the region, Michael Bollig looks at how this 'Arid Eden' came into being, how this 'last frontier' was construed, and how local pastoralists relate to the landscape. Putting the intricate and changing relations between humans, arid savannah grasslands and its co-evolving animal inhabitants at the centre of his analysis, this history of material relations, of power struggles between commercial hunters and wildlife, between wealthy cattle patrons and foraging clients, between established homesteads and recent migrants, conservationists and pastoralists. Finally, Bollig highlights how futures are being aspired to and planned for between the increasing challenges of climate change, global demands for cheap ores and quests for biodiversity conservation.
For ten years, a U.S. Navy sailor, code-name PYTHON, spies for the Soviets. All U.S. intelligence agencies continually fail at their attempts to discover the identities of PYTHON and his Soviet Controller. Then, a dead body and U.S. classified messages are found in a wrecked car at the bottom of a ravine near Madrid. The messages are traced to a U.S. Navy warship. The Defense Intelligence Agency and The Office of Naval Intelligence fail to uncover PYTHON's identity and activities aboard the warship. Dissatisfied and frustrated over the string of failures to find PYTHON, The Chief of Naval Operations permits ONI to implement a bold and unconventional program for recruiting ONI counterintelligence agents. ONI's Lieutenant Commander Brad Watson recruits a young sailor named Rigney Page to find PYTHON. At first, Rigney Page sees his mission as just one of life's adventures to satisfy self-serving needs. Then, he discovers another side of himself. During his search for PYTHON, he meets several women who teach him about commitment and tolerance and who elevate his sexual senses to new heights. Rigney's adventure takes him to a Navy Guided Missile Cruiser that is on patrol in the Mediterranean. He renews an old friendship, and he makes some sinister enemies. His search for PYTHON comes to a brutal confrontation in a quiet beach town in southern Italy.
At age twelve, author Thomas Michael Johnson faced the death of a great-grandparent he was close to as a child. That trauma left him with an irrational fear of losing loved ones. By the time he married and became a father, the fear of death living within him was incapacitating and debilitating, often causing difficulties in his personal and professional life. Seeking freedom from this terror, Johnson began to understand the difference between joy and happiness; he was delivered from the fear some six weeks before his wife’s untimely demise. After nearly nineteen years of marriage, he woke to find his beloved wife had passed away while he slept. He suddenly became a single parent of three sons (ages seventeen, thirteen, and twelve), struggling through the typical single-parent issues with an added layer of grief. Johnson’s middle son’s autism added to the challenges. In Good Grief, Johnson shares an account of the trepidation he lived through as a young man, his freedom from the fear of death before his wife died, and the two years following her death. This memoir focuses on the lessons he learned from God directly, from scripture, and from the tight-knit group of family and friends God had given him. Raw and authentic, Johnson chronicles a story of his experience as a grieving widower, a single father, and a broken child of God who had no choice but to ask for help from those surrounding him, while trying to restore joy in his home.
Takes readers to the frigid winter of '23, when bootleggers and civilians alike struggle with icy weather and the law. As if the Windsor PD didn't have their hands full, drug-smuggling, and human trafficking take them into unfamiliar territory ... and the occult brings a wholly unexpected twist.
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