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President Obama has said it over and over — to help balance the federal budget, the wealthiest Americans should pay more in taxes. Republicans frame it a different way and say raising those taxes would hit small businesses, making them less likely to hire new workers.

The entertainment industry seems to give us only three things: sex, Justin Bieber and boxing.

Justin Bieber aside, don't producers know almost nobody cares anymore about boxing? But here we have Clifford Odets' period piece, Golden Boy, back on Broadway, and — achtung! — a musical of Rocky mounted in Germany.

Plus the usual same-old, same-old treatments are floating around. Eminem wants to make a boxing movie. Really. Worse, there are actual plans to have Sylvester Stallone fight Robert DeNiro in a boxing film. OMG — I am perfectly serious.

I say, please, can't we do sports movies for the sports fans who still exist and care? Yes, I know, as we say, that "in the full scheme of things" caring passionately about a mere sport is not important. And yes, sports fans are not necessarily the most discriminating. What is American parents' greatest nightmare? That they will spend $60,000 a year to send their son to Duke University, and then they will turn on the TV and see him half-naked, with his face painted blue, contorted, screaming at some poor guy from Wake Forest or Clemson shooting a free throw.

But most important, right now I wish the entertainment moguls would do a play or a film for the poor hockey fans, who don't have an NHL season because the owners have locked out the players and, as we know, there is no bipartisanship left in America today. Or, I guess, in Canada now, too.

Sports

Russia's Hockey Glad To Have NHL-Lockout Orphans

Antonio, Domingo and Pepe are old friends in their late 40s and 50s. All unemployed, they meet most mornings for coffee and cigarettes in Madrid's Puerta del Sol square and rant about the government.

The nation's civil service is a particularly attractive target. The men grumble about what they imagine is the life of a government worker — long coffee breaks, siestas and lots of paid time off.

"They earn much more than they're worth," Antonio says. "That's something that's got to change. They earn a lot, and they hardly do anything."

Jobs For Life

Spanish civil servants do earn a lot, compared with their private sector counterparts. Virtually all the best and brightest young graduates want to work for the government, and many are willing to stay on waiting lists for years — without pay — in hopes of snagging a position.

Civil servants took a recent hit when the government decided to cut their holiday bonuses this year, but even so, Spanish public workers are still the envy of their countrymen.

When Spain's economic crisis hit, the private sector immediately started shedding jobs and cutting wages. New labor reforms have made it even easier for companies to do so, and unemployment now tops 25 percent.

In contrast, most public employees still have jobs for life, says economist Gayle Allard of Madrid's IE Business School.

"They have had their wages frozen. Hiring has been frozen. But it's not the kind of severe adjustment you're seeing in the private sector," Allard says. "You hear people say, 'Wait a minute! In my company, we've cut all of our costs 30 percent. What's their problem? We're doing this, why can't they do it?' "

Strong Unions, Strong Numbers

One reason is the civil service's strong union contracts; another is the sheer number of civil servants in Spain. Bureaucrats, doctors, teachers and other public workers amount to 2.6 million people, more than 11 percent of the population. That makes politicians think twice about crossing them.

Spaniards also have a different attitude toward the state. The Pew Research Center recently found that while 6 in 10 Americans say they want to be free of interference from the state, more than 6 in 10 Spaniards say the opposite — that it's the government's job to make sure nobody is in need.

"It's a funny thing," says Allard. "I think Americans ... have a hard time understanding it, because we don't assign such a high value to security. But for Spaniards, that's really, really important."

Europe

Spain's Crisis Leads To Rise Of Grass-Roots Groups

The popular website Intrade allows its users to bet on the odds of almost anything — like whether Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will get ousted by a certain date, or whether the movie Argo will win best picture at the Oscars.

This week, Ireland-based Intrade announced that U.S. users will have to unwind their bets and shut down their accounts by the end of the year. That's after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Intrade for operating an unregistered exchange.

Transactions on the site have long resided in a gray area in the U.S., with little clarity as to whether they represent gambling, futures trading or something else that should not be regulated — leaving some questioning the legal basis for cracking down on so-called "prediction markets."

'More Accurate Than Pundits'

"Conceptually, to an economist, there's not a difference between betting and trading — apart from the fact that one sounds more polite than the other," says Justin Wolfers, who grew up in Australia working for bookies taking bets.

Now a University of Michigan professor who's studied Intrade, Wolfers says the site is not just a venue for winning and losing money. It also generates news as a byproduct, he says. That is, the odds on Intrade are almost always right.

"It tends to be more accurate than pundits, it tends to be more accurate than polls, and in the past it's even more accurate than very sophisticated poll-watchers like The New York Times' Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com," Wolfers says.

To use Intrade, members place bets on yes-or-no questions. Much like a stock, the price of placing a bet fluctuates based on demand. And when the outcome is determined, the payout is either $10 or nothing. If you win, your profit is that $10, minus the price you paid to place your bet.

According to Thomas Bell, a professor at Chapman Law School in California, the CFTC considers those transactions enough like pork belly futures — which fall under the commission's authority — to be shut down.

It's All Politics

They Call The Election A Horse Race; It Has Real Bettors, Too