Insurance, taxes, and snow

Tea Party Shadows Health Care Ruling: “It is difficult to imagine,” Judge Vinson, of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., wrote in a central passage of his 78-page opinion, “that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.” Supporters of the health care act — which Judge Vinson invalidated after ruling it was unconstitutional to require citizens to buy health insurance — saw in the language a deliberate nod to the Tea Party movement. Government can mandate that all drivers must have insurance in order to drive; how is that so very different?

The Return of the Cranky Mayor: After a short, uncharacteristic stretch of empathy and contrition from New York City’s chief executive following the Blizzard Brouhaha, the moody mayor re-emerged on Wednesday morning, ready to sass. The setting was the Blue Room at City Hall, where Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked why municipal employees were being penalized for not showing up to work during a snowstorm last week — even though the city instructed most of them to stay home. Sympathetic he was not. I hadn't noticed that the Mayor had stopped being cranky.

The Paradox of Corporate Taxes: Of the 500 big companies in the well-known Standard & Poor’s stock index, 115 paid a total corporate tax rate — both federal and otherwise — of less than 20 percent over the last five years, according to an analysis of company reports done for The New York Times by Capital IQ, a research firm. Thirty-nine of those companies paid a rate less than 10 percent.