Internship

Well friends and family, I have begun my internship with ALEC.
Its offices are located near K street in the NW part of the city off the McPherson metro stop. The K street area of DC is full of corporations, financial centers, businessy type places, so everyone walking around looks important. I do my best to fit in, mastering the DC stare and walk, never talking to anyone. I am working on the 11th floor of the building and the ALEC offices take up the whole floor which is cool because we can muse about free markets and creative destruction all on our own floor. The task forces I am researching with are great, interesting topics and fun people. My directors are solid, fun, relatively young guys. Yesterday, they had me researching for an upcoming education policy publication and I spent all afternoon looking at a bunch of figures on tuition at Ohio State, the doings of its president, Gordan Gee (interesting fellow), and how 73 upper level faculty and adminstrators are paid over $300k. That kind of pay in itself isn't necessarily an evil, just the fact that it's at a public school and tuition prices keep rising as they add more people onto the heavy payroll. Fun stuff. For reals. Tax and Fiscal policy research hasn't begun yet, but I've been reading over that department's publicatons, such as Rich States Poor States and the "inverse relationship between higher taxes and higher growth rates" (Steve Moore said that, not I).

In other news, there have been a lot of heavy conversations lately amongst all the neighbors on our floor. I love political and social conversations, but having multiple heavy ones within two days, flying solo too, is a tiring experience. Good but tiring.

In other other news, how about us taxpayers taking over all those multibillion dollar (or trillion dollar) failing banks? Feels great, right?