Litigation

What do we do now that "the bab-oon" is out of the bag?

"Babs" appears on Hedwig's blog today stating that there has been a mischarcterization of the intent of his article.

This follows an "intellectual discussion" with this author on Friday in which Babener, in the face of criticism from my "Enter the Dissipation Myth "Baboons"" post, asked me to soften a word from "opine" to "imply".

?The absence of such documented empirical evidence to support favorable tax treatment of structured settlements does not negate the validity of the consensus of professional opinion.  From a policy standpoint, however, the fundamental importance of this subsidy demands more than mere opinion. A policy that impacts millions of taxpayers and subsidy recipients is deserving of a substantiated empirical foundation.?

Play around with the semantics, read the above excerpt, read the paper, if you care, and decide for yourself if Babener is attacking the tax subsidy or not. Decide for yourself whether it's worthy of further debate. In my opinion it isn't. If it's all about use of a flawed statistic, thank you very much, it's an easy fix. But isn't 33 pages an awful lot of space to simply justify a study? 

Instead of wasting any more time on this issue let me digest it for you:

1. Stop emphasizing the "90% in 5 years" IF you still do. Scan your websites and marketing materials for remnants of any "pernicous" cache.
2. Do the usual with Hedwig, hit IGNORE

The operative question is Hindert Babener's svengali?  I'm beginning to wonder when tracking links to this blog come from wikispaces account associated with Babener. Hindert has been pushing wikis as the Web 2.0 "drug" of choice as hard as he's been pushing factoring to anyone who will listen.