Ed Wallace:

Twenty-two years ago the California Air Resource Board decided to enact a new mandate that would have required that a large percentage of any vehicles auto manufacturers sold in the Golden State have zero emissions at the tailpipe – and CARB officials were adamant that this would be accomplished in less than a decade. Every major manufacturer understood this to be a demand that they sell mostly electric cars out west. Only Honda took it to mean that, if its emissions could be reduced to nothing, a gasoline-powered car could be sold in California. Of course, just to hedge its bet, Honda delivered the EV-Plus electric car in order to meet the new rules.



The mandate in and of itself was something close to insanity. But it was also the start of the modern era of electric, series hybrid-electric and partial zero-emissions vehicles.

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

The headlines about the US newspaper industry have never been so bleak.

In recent weeks, LinkedIn, the networking website, and the Council of Economic Advisers have reported that the press is “America’s fastest-shrinking industry”, measured by jobs lost; the Newspaper Association of America has shown that advertising sales have halved since 2005 and are now at 1984’s level; and the Pew Research Center has found that for every digital ad dollar they earned, they lost $7 in print ads.

As media from television to billboards bounce back from the recession, newsprint is being left behind. Zenith Optimedia this week predicted that internet advertising would pass newspaper advertising next year around the world – but in the US, where internet penetration is high and newspaper audiences are shrinking, digital will overtake newspapers’ and magazines’ combined ad sales this year, eMarketer estimates.

David Cay Johnston:

If President Barack Obama can persuade Congress to reduce the corporate income tax rate to 28 percent from 35 percent, he will move tax rates closer to what other modern countries charge.

But his plan to treat “manufacturing” as a special category, with a 25 percent tax rate, brings us to what I call Obama’s hamburger problem.



The problem is how to define manufacturing. To paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart on obscenity, I know manufacturing when I see it; I just don’t know how to define it in tax law.



Assembling automobiles is considered manufacturing. So what about assembling two hot protein discs with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions — all on a sesame seed bun?



The notion of hamburger-making as manufacturing may seem silly, a bit like the 1981 U.S. Agriculture Departmentproposal to classify ketchup as a vegetable for school lunches. But classifying activities as manufacturing or not becomes crucial if manufacturers pay taxes at a reduced rate.