There are always a few items we’ve read during a week that deserve more attention but don’t make it into our regular posts. So we bundle them for the Friday roundup.
Here’s this week’s bundle
Charles Murray (WSJ commentary): A Guaranteed Income for Every American
The [Universal Basic Income] has brought together odd bedfellows. Its advocates on the left see it as a move toward social justice; its libertarian supporters (like Friedman) see it as the least damaging way for the government to transfer wealth from some citizens to others. Either way, the UBI is an idea whose time has finally come, but it has to be done right.
First, my big caveat: A UBI will do the good things I claim only if it replaces all other transfer payments and the bureaucracies that oversee them.
The Olympian: Controversial school-funding rulings prompt crowded Supreme Court races
A coordinated recruitment effort has helped make 2016 the first year in recent memory that all three justices up for re-election are facing challengers…
The races are nonpartisan, but all three challengers share the view that the court has failed to respect the autonomy of the Legislature by holding the state in contempt in the McCleary case...The three judicial candidates also take issue with the court’s 2015 decision striking down the state’s voter-approved charter school law.
New Geography: The Cruel Information Economy: The U.S. Cities Winning in this Critical Sector
Yet the information boom has other epicenters that have emerged over the past decade. Among the large metro areas, Seattle-Bellevue-Everett ranks seventh on our list. It boasts 98,000 information jobs, third most in the country behind much larger New York and Los Angeles. Since 2010 the Puget Sound powerhouse, home to Microsoft, Amazon and a host of start-ups, has seen its information employment expand a healthy 15.3%.
Seattle Times: State’s aerospace tax breaks went to nearly 290 companies, large and small
Kelly Maloney, chief executive of the Aerospace Futures Alliance, the state aerospace lobbying organization, said it’s easy to justify the tax breaks.
“The investment that aerospace companies put into this state is far greater than the tax incentives they receive,” she said.
