Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)

UberX driver Eli Martin of Elgin has been hoping local residents will embrace the ride-share industry like they have in Chicago, where he does most of his work.

Elgin taxi driver Byron Parker has been watching the competition slowly make its way into the suburbs, bemoaning it’s not as heavily regulated as the taxi industry.

The Elgin City Council’s committee of the whole will look at both sides of the issue tonight, when members are expected to consider regulations for the ride-share industry that, if enacted, would be the strictest in the country.

As lawmakers reconvened for the final week of their annual veto session, Republican Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner said Tuesday at the state Capitol that Illinois’ budget condition is even worse than was previously discussed.

The venture capitalist from Winnetka is meeting with state budget experts and “getting into the hard facts on the budget right now,” he said.

“Every time we look under the hood, look at different departments, look at different issues, the problems, the deficits, the overspending is more significant than has been discussed in the past. We want to make sure we understand it,” Rauner said.

I was in an Uber car the other day, returning from a conference. I love Uber and used it for years in Chicago before returning to my hometown, Atlanta. There are a lot of amusing exposés out there contending that the majority of Uber drivers hate their jobs and feel enslaved by corporate overlords.

Virtually every driver I encounter tells me they love working with Uber; an off-duty Uber driver once overheard me saying something about the company over lunch, and he volunteered enthusiastically that he loves his job. There was no driver rating at stake in that exchange.

I’ve had interesting discussions in Uber cars. One driver told me he had walked a young woman into the ER minutes before picking me up (he thought she had overdosed). Another driver explained how he had escaped New Orleans just hours before Katrina hit, only to return to complete destruction. And there have been quite a few who’ve told me they drive to earn money to build other businesses. Uber drivers are by definition entrepreneurs. And many see driving as a stepping-stone to something bigger.

From tiny app developers to major retailers, the response is often the same: You’re kidding me.

That was the reaction of both Lee Cheng and Todd Moore when they got letters saying their companies were violating patents.

Moore makes smartphone applications as founder of the three-person TMSoft LLC. His alleged violation was having a hyperlink connecting one Web page to another. Cheng, the chief legal officer and senior vice present for Newegg Inc., found his company sued for using an online shopping cart.

President Obama doesn’t do many favors for Republicans, but last week he did them an inadvertent one when he threatened to veto a $450 billion package of special-interest tax provisions that the GOP leadership had negotiated with Harry Reid . Now they have a chance to kill the entire project in favor of going for corporate tax reform next year.

Alas, we’re probably hoping for too much. The GOP-Reid package would have made many of the provisions permanent, but that has happily died with Mr. Obama’s veto threat. But rather than let the tax favors die, the House GOP is moving this week to vote on another one-year extension of about 50 “temporary” tax subsidies.

Washington has been reauthorizing these temporary tax breaks since the 1980s, pausing to occasionally stuff more special-interest payoffs into the broader package. This latest House vote would cost taxpayers $44.7 billion over 10 years, and it includes tax perks for, among other national priorities, Hollywood films, wind turbines, Nascar owners and race horses.

Here is how The Wall Street Journal interprets the above chart, taken from spending surveys and diaries of 14,000 US households, particularly as regards consumer spending:

The American middle class has absorbed a steep increase in the cost of health care and other necessities as incomes have stagnated over the past half decade, a squeeze that has forced families to cut back spending on everything from clothing to restaurants.

Health-care spending by middle-income Americans rose 24% between 2007 and 2013, driven by an even larger rise in the cost of buying health insurance, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of detailed consumer-spending data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Congress is poised to prohibit Medicare from spending an estimated $444 million for vacuum pumps used to treat erectile dysfunction in the next decade, a cost-saving move that may frustrate people who can’t afford drugs such as Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra.

Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit, created in 2003, generally isn’t permitted to cover Viagra or other erectile- dysfunction medicines. A bill under consideration by Congress would put a similar ban on the pump devices some people use as an alternative. The spending estimate was published yesterday by the Congressional Budget Office.

Cutting Medicare coverage of the pumps will help offset the cost of creating new tax-advantaged savings accounts for severely disabled people. The accounts would help them qualify for programs for low-income people, such as Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income, because most of the savings wouldn’t be considered assets.

In residential treatment centers across Illinois, children are assaulted, sexually abused and running away by the thousands — yet state officials fail to act on reports of harm and continue sending waves of youths to the most troubled and violent facilities, a Tribune investigation found.

At a cost to taxpayers of well over $200 million per year, the residential centers promise round-the-clock supervision and therapy to state wards with histories of abuse and neglect, as well as other disadvantaged youths with mental health and behavioral problems. On any given day, about 1,400 wards live in the centers, although far more cycle through each year.

In the best cases, the facilities rebuild and even save young lives. But the Tribune found that many underprivileged youths — most of them African-American — are shuttled for years from one grim institution to another before emerging more damaged than when they went in.