We Can Save Our Malls

While watching the magnificent Mutant Girls Squad, I saw a possible way to our dying malls.Human SacrificeNo, not some weeping virgin clerk from Footlocker - a champion of the forces that have brought our once proud malls to their knees.
I propose we kidnap champions of the counterculture and have them engage in mortal combat with our valiant mall security forces. Champions of socialism, champions of urbanism, champions of small business, champions of ecommerce fighting to the death in our mall concourses. Once vanquished, our customers, clerks and maintenance personnel can gather and ritually feast on the champion. But not before he is skinned so he can be taxidermiated and put on display in a sacred spot in the mall, like the food court.
This will reinvigorate the shoppers and bring them back to the malls where they can bask in the pinball machine like environment, the bad service, and the mass produced merchandise that hails from exotic third world countries, made with love by barefoot little children.
This can work, brothers and sisters. This will be our destiny.

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Economic Indicators
In this day and age I have no idea why housing starts are any indicator of the economy. Heck, it's wild home buying promotions that got us in the pickle we're in today. I understand why housing starts got their clout after WWII but the population growth is sputtering out & a lot of those houses built in the second half of the 20th century were built to last. New housing for some time now should be growing at a pace rivaling M$oft's OS glacial pace of growth. That is - the market is saturated
ScienceFiction.com reports comic book sales had their best January since 2008. Dunno if this should be any kind of economic bellwether - it might just be some kind of ouroboric film / comic book entertainment cycle. Seems as good as using housing to gauge the economy, tho. I mean, what's a house but a place to keep your comic books?

How Important are Tax Rates ?
Interesting look at tax rates over the last century & whether they impact economic growth.
I swear it's got more to do with lifestyle products than taxes. We need a new product.