Editorial Roundup: Excerpts From Recent Editorials in Newspapers in the US and Abroad

Excerpts from recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

Aug. 9

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

More from PostPolitics

Is Joe Biden a liability for Obama?

Aaron Blake

Polls show the vice president was something short of popular -- even before his recent comments drew fire.

Paul Ryan’s stimulus problem

Aaron Blake

Ryan says he has never sought stimulus funds, but he has written letters on behalf of constituents seeking stimulus funds. So what's the difference?

Romney tries to shift tax debate

Chris Cillizza

THE FIX | Mitt Romney says he paid 13 percent in taxes for the past 10 years. But is the case closed?

More tech stories

Apple, Microsoft, Google and the sad state of TV

Janko Roettgers | GigaOM.com

As it looks now, Apple is just going to repackage the good old cable bundle and make it available through yet another device.

Kenny the Clown: I got iPad from friend accused of breaking into Jobs' house

Associated Press

A professional clown says he had no idea it was pilfered from the Apple co-founder’s house.

Dunkin’ Donuts releases its own mobile pay app for Android, iOS

VentureBeat.com

The new mobile pay option is accepted in-store and at drive-thru windows at the chain’s more than 7,000 U.S. locations.

Los Angeles Times on Olympic tax loopholes:

Olympic athletes are very special people. But are they more special than, say, Nobel Prize winners, or police officers, or nurses, or spiritual gurus, or brilliant inventors or researchers whose discoveries enhance our lives? If an election year happens to fall in an Olympics year, yes.

Both presidential candidates have embraced an astonishingly silly but highly populist measure in Congress to exempt Olympic medalists from taxes, an idea that, naturally, originated with that bastion of silly but populist tax proposals, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. The U.S. Olympic Committee awards honorariums in the amount of $25,000 for each gold medal, $15,000 for silver and $10,000 for bronze, which means, Norquist’s group sputters, that a gold medalist would be on the hook to send up to $8,986 of his or her winnings to the IRS.

Never mind that the fact-checking organization PolitiFact ruled this claim “Mostly False,” because any decent accountant could reduce that tax bite to as little as zero by deducting the expenses paid to win that medal, such as travel, uniforms, classes, payments to coaches, cost of equipment, etc. Republicans, with some Democratic support, quickly sponsored legislation in the House and Senate to make Norquist’s notion law, and the White House weighed in by saying that if Congress approves the bill, President Barack Obama will sign it.

Why? There’s no legitimate tax policy reason. Politicians in both parties complain endlessly about the complexity of the U.S. tax code and its many needless loopholes, yet they’re only too happy to add to the complexity and drill another loophole in an election season when liberals and conservatives alike are rooting for Team USA in London.

This mindless bill should be rejected with the authority of a Kerri Walsh Jennings block.

Online:

http://www.latimes.com

___

Aug. 11

The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss., on NASA:

The next time you use your cellphone, watch satellite-delivered television programming, use a cordless power tool, drive on enhanced radial tires, drink a bottle of purified water or find your way with a GPS device, thank the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

From medical advancements to aircraft anti-collision warning systems to personal computers, NASA scientists and contractors advancing our space program invented, developed or improved the technology that made all of these conveniences possible. It’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like today if the American people had not accepted space exploration as a national priority in the 1960s.

The incredible challenge of designing and building rockets that could soar around the earth, the guidance systems to direct these rockets to the moon, the need for small, lightweight technology that can manage volumes of data at one time, the food and clothing that would allow a human to leave the earth and travel through almost unimaginable temperature changes and weightlessness, all required the development of technologies at a level of sophistication previously unknown.