The enlightened city council of the enlightened city of West Covina, California has voted to deny WalMart a business permit. The reasons given for this denial was the failure of the company to pay a fair wage and provide sufficient benefits to its employees.

Notwithstanding the discriminatory and capricious nature of this decree (do they also hold the mom-and-pop bookstores, dry cleaners, laundries, nail salons, etc. to the same standards?), clearly the citizens of West Covina who were awaiting employment applications must feel grateful to the city council, who obviously are smarter and better able than they to decide where and how they should be employed, for protecting them from exploitation before it was too late and they were already at work. That was a close one.

Remember this next time you apply for a job. The federal and state labor and compensation laws are not always enough to protect you. Better to be unemployed than exploited.

And while you look elsewhere, don't forget that this is a "jobless recovery."

A story in today's Wall Street Journal is a perfect example of what happens when an ill-informed public responds to a poorly-worded poll, further compounded by sloppy journalism misreading the results and then reporting them with a misleading headline.

"Poll Shows Most Americans Would Rather pay More to IRS Than Spend Less on Programs," reads the subheadline on the story. Sounds unbelievable, right? I thought so, so I read the story, and typically, it didn't reprint the exact question in the poll, but indicated that the actual question was to choose a preference for reducing the deficit through either rolling back the recent tax cuts or spending less on health and education. Setting aside the subtexts and fallacious assumptions of such a question, not to mention the Hobbesian choice presented, this wording is quite different from the subheadline. Specifically, "canceling some tax cuts" is not equivalent to "Pay More to IRS."

The sample size of the poll was 1,002. If the sample is an exact representation of the adult population, then 60% of them would see little or no increase in taxes if the cuts were cancelled because of our steeply progressive system. And a large portion of that 60% are likely to be more dependent upon government largesse than the remaining 40%. Knowing this, what percentage would you expect to favor canceling some tax cuts? If you guessed 60%, you are correct but get no reward for stating the obvious.