Columbia Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who works for a tax-exempt institution that bought him an $8 million townhouse to live in (exempt from property tax because it is owned by Columbia), was last seen here exhorting an Occupy Wall Street audience to go find the One Percent and "Tell 'em they're paying, whether they like it or not."

Now Professor Sachs, of all people, has emerged to side with Mayor de Blasio against Governor Cuomo on the question of whether New York's high-income individuals should be forced to pay taxes even higher than the current top rates, which are more than 50 percent at the margin.

The Boston Globe, in an article about the philanthropy of Jeremy Grantham, Seth Klarman, Jonathon Jacobson, and Jeffrey Vinik, reports: "Longtime Boston investment executive Jeffrey Vinik, once chief of the Fidelity Magellan fund and later head of his own hedge fund, now lives in Tampa but still directs a portion of his family's $212 million foundation giving here."

Hmm, why might Mr. Vinik have moved from Boston to Tampa? Maybe the weather? He reportedly owns a hockey team in Tampa, but a 2012 Tampa Bay Times article about his move ("Tampa, Meet Your New Neighbor, Jeff Vinik) also says he owns part of the Boston Red Sox.

The "Grumpy Economist," University of Chicago professor John Cochrane, has a typically intriguing post about a lecture by Lawrence Summers. Professor Summers said:

In the United States today a higher fraction of the workforce receives disability insurance than does production work in manufacturing...

These phenomena are related. No one could give a Feldstein lecture without recognizing the possibility that a social insurance program had a distorting disincentive effect and that is certainly the case with respect to disability insurance.

Professor Cochrane writes:

Mayor de Blasio's wife, Chirlane McCray, will have a chief of staff, former Al Sharpton spokeswoman Rachel Noerdlinger, who will earn a city government salary of $170,000 a year, the New York Observer reports. That's $2,000 less than Michelle Obama's chief of staff made, according to one report, and isn't bad money to help lead Mr. de Blasio's campaign against "inequality."

The D.C. circuit's ruling in Verizon v. FCC is the topic of libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week for the Hoover Institution's Web site:

Which offers more hope and change, West Coast tech start-up culture or Washington political culture? The question answers itself, I write in my column this week, about how companies like Uber are finding business success and creating opportunity by offering ways around government bureaucracy. Please check out the column at Reason (here) or at Newsmax (here) and, if it resonates for you and you are moved to do so, share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Fox News and conservative radio figure Sean Hannity has announced he is going to follow Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and leave the high-tax state of New York for either Florida or Texas, which is something to remember the next time the left claims, as it regularly does, that the idea that the rich move away because of high taxes is phony.

David Greenberg, David Nasaw, and I are appearing Wednesday January 22 at 6:30 p.m. at the New-York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side to talk about President Kennedy. FutureOfCapitalism readers are warmly welcome. Tickets are available here.

Arnold Relman's article in the New York Review of Books, "On Breaking One's Neck," will be of interest to those following the health-care policy debate.

is Product Hunt.

If you ever find yourself discouraged by the news from Washington or city hall or the state capital, head over there.

David Brooks has a pretty good column today on income inequality.

The departure of Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (he's going to be ambassador to China) and the accession to that post of Senator Wyden may be an opportunity for tax reform, Floyd Norris writes in an intriguing New York Times column:

Few senators have shown as much eagerness to work across the aisle as he has. He has been pushing his own tax plan in concert with Senator Dan Coats, Republican of Indiana. That plan at least broadly follows the lines of any tax overhaul now possible: a reduction in stated tax rates, with the loss in revenue made up by closing loopholes and exemptions.

Senator Wyden is not talking about his plan now, pending his ascendancy to the chairmanship, but it remains on his website.

From the summary of the plan on Senator Wyden's Web site:

What's wrong with France? Charles Wyplosz writes:

For thirty years now, the unemployment rate has hovered around 8%, and it has been around 25% among the young. The diagnosis is well known: the labour market is highly rigid, with redundancies difficult and costly, unemployment benefits which last for years, and generous welfare payments when these run out. One can live a whole life on the dole, and we now see a second generation of people who simply do not work.

The statutory minimum wage is so high that school dropouts cannot be employed at this rate. In the suburbs where they are concentrated, drug dealing and petty crime can be the norm. High unemployment, meanwhile, feeds an anxiety which means every parent wants their children to enjoy the job security of a public servant.

From a press release summarizing a Quinnipiac University Poll of 1,288 New York City voters:

In an open-ended question, where respondents can give any answer, 20 percent of voters say education should be the top priority for the mayor and City Council, followed by 13 percent for jobs and 9 percent each for crime/safety and housing/affordable housing. Only 2 percent list "income inequality" or "class inequality." Another 2 percent list wages/minimum wage.

...A total of 83 percent of voters say income inequality is a "very serious" or "somewhat serious" problem.

Voters say 66 - 25 percent that New York City government should try to reduce the gap between rich and poor. V

oters support 69 - 27 percent increasing the New York City income tax on households making more than $500,000 per year.

Support is 74 - 23 percent to increase taxes on households making more than $500,000 per year if the money is used to fund pre-kindergarten for all New York City children.

NPR has an item about Eat With, a company that operates a web site that pairs customers with hosts of dinner parties:

Recently I went to a "taco party" I found through the Eat With website. I paid $40 to go to the home of two fun-loving Latinas. They have a great apartment, filled with art, just across from the Brooklyn Museum. As soon as their guests arrived they made it a point to shove rum drinks into our hands.

To open a restaurant in New York, you have to jump through all sorts of government-created hoops for licenses, inspections, and fees. Going the "Eat With" route allows would-be restaurant-operators to avoid all of that. The NPR item doesn't catch onto that, though some of the comments raise the issue.