Barbara Ehrenreich's take on the troubled stock market. Check it out, if only for the tongue-in-cheek phrases like "smashing the global financial system."

Matthew Yglesias: Preschool money for poor kids is the sort of thing that sounds good when a state is flush. When a recession comes, Medicaid costs go up, and tax revenues go down it's another matter. The state needs to balance its budget, and it's not going to want to do it by slashing services the middle class enjoys. So it comes down to tax increases and cutting services for the poor (and, of course, infrastructure maintenance as we've seen recently) and the poor tend to lose.

Reading an article about housing projects in New Orleans that are slated for demolition, I saw something that got me thinking about deserving-ness and inequality. By the turn of the century, when I first walked through a New Orleans housing project for my own work (representing poor people facing the death penalty), I found it difficult to believe that the government could legally allow people to live in such squalor, with windows busted out on many units, with doors knocked in exposing interiors covered with graffiti, with children playing in trash-strewn common areas overgrown with weeds taller than them. By this point, America had given up on the notion of the deserving poor in favor of the view that identified the mostly working mothers who occupied the majority of these units as "welfare queens" having children in order to get bigger government checks. It isn't just the nation. I'd argue that much of the progressive community has all but given up on making a strong case for a deserving poor and middle class.

One of the more interesting tax policy debates of the internet age is heating up, as Congress considers the ban on internet access taxation. The ban is due to expire in November. The current internet sales tax regime, governed by case law rather than legislation, may also come under discussion. State and local governments have long argued that the federal access tax ban deprives them of something on the order of $10 billion annually and that the ban runs afoul of traditional notions of federalism.