Also on today’s menu:
Better Hearing, Or Is It Just Louder?
Capitalism Defeats Taxpayers
Another landmark on its way out: Dave and Laurel Greenlaw, along with their long-time employee, Pete Bissonnette, are planning to retire once the contents of Greenlaw’s Music in Laconia are sold. Greenlaw’s Celebration Retirement Sale started on Monday, with 25 percent off its merchandise.
Years ago, if I couldn’t find a record at other stores, I could usually find it at Greenlaw’s. As they noted in Roberta Baker’s story in the Laconia Daily Sun, the store carried everything from Elvis Presley to AC/DC and The Clash during the vinyl years. I once even found a Jimmy Rodgers album for my father in the days before I learned to also appreciate Rodger’s voice and yodeling.
Roberta quotes Greenlaw as saying he remembers celebrities such as actors Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, and Vincent Price stopping by, as well as blues artist Robert Cray, Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, and Sonny and Cher. “These people would wander around the city and come in,” he said.
But, as with other businesses, “The age of the internet made everybody armchair shoppers. This country has hemorrhaged more stores in the last five or six years,” Bissonnette said, noting that Manchester lost four of five music stores in one year.
Better Hearing, Or Is It Just Louder?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a landmark proposal intended to improve access to and reduce the cost of hearing aid technology for millions of Americans. The agency proposed a rule to establish a new category of over-the-counter hearing aids which would allow consumers to purchase them in stores or online without a medical exam or a fitting by an audiologist.
As might be expected, audiologists have opposed the idea ever since the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act was enacted in the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017. While air-conduction hearing aids can help with mild to moderate hearing loss, hearing aids for those with severe hearing loss should be calibrated according to a person’s unique needs, they say.
The new proposal addresses that concern by placing the devices into separate categories and saying that people with severe hearing loss or those younger than age 18 should be required to get prescriptions. The change is seen as helping to increase competition while also ensuring the safety and effectiveness of both OTC and prescription hearing aids.
About 15 percent of American adults (37.5 million) who are 18 and over report some hearing problems, but only about one-fifth of the people who could benefit from a hearing aid use one. The proposed rule aims to address cost, access, social stigma related to hearing loss, perceived value of the devices, and certain state and federal regulations.
Capitalism Defeats Taxpayers
An article in the Los Angeles Times tells the story of how Intuit, the company that brought us TurboTax — the software that even tax preparers turn to — halted an initiative to provide return-free tax filing in California. Now the federal government is taking another look at California’s dead proposal.
The idea was that, rather than forcing people of moderate means to struggle with gathering the information needed to fill out their tax forms, the state already had all the information needed to complete those forms. Intuit and H&R Block fought the idea of a state-operated free filing service in order to offer their own tax solutions. They persuaded the IRS to let them provide the government’s congressionally mandated free electronic filing service, branded Free File. Now they stand accused of using that authority to swindle taxpayers by obscuring the Free File offerings online and luring consumers to other products with steep fees.
ProPublica revealed that Intuit and other companies coded their Free File websites so they would not turn up on most Google searches from taxpayers seeking no-cost filing. Faced with lawsuits over their actions, H&R Block and now Intuit have exited the Free File partnership with the IRS, leaving no return-free filing option. Scholars say some 30 other countries already offer free filing and, while they acknowledge that the U.S. tax system is more complicated than that of the other countries now using it and that adjustments would be needed in the tax code to make it work here, recent innovations at the IRS show the agency can give taxpayers a viable return-free option.
The argument against that approach by tax-preparation firms is that a return-free system could allow the IRS to tell taxpayers they need to pay more than they owe.
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