February 2012
7 posts
“All of my friends turned out to be insurance men.”
– John Prine
January 2012
9 posts
4 tags
Effective tax rates and the corporate income tax,...
There was a time, it was oh I don’t know, the day before Mitt Romney released his taxes, when an effective tax rate was simply the total tax that a person or household paid on income.
In my case, for example, my effective tax rate included not only the tax I paid to the IRS, but also the tax I paid to the state and city. For a person like me, this meant that my effective tax rate in really...
There is a meeting here tonight - Joe & Eddie →
A million could do it
A problem with a list of great organizers is that is the bench is so deep that there is no good place to stop. It has me wondering how big the committee might be.
But seriously, who owns the list? If the answer is nobody, we have only ourselves to blame. Get one million on the committee and the turf is manageable. Are there 100,000 organizers? 10,000? I don’t know. My bet would be on the...
Reuters: Romney's steel skeleton in Bain's closet →
Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 (258 pounds) a month.
What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan....
Kaplan: The coming war over the Pentagon budget →
“I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why...”
– Newt Gingrich
Krugman: The mendacity of dopes →
Now, what about people like Cochrane? You need to bear two things in mind. First, he and his friends entered this whole debate by declaring that Keynesian economics of any stripe was total nonsense, “fairy tales” that nobody serious believes. Then they proceeded to make howling, basic errors. And I was supposed to respond politely? I’ve never gone ad hominem on them — but I’ve called nonsense and...
Cowen on Krugman →
Krugman calls himself a Humean but has he studied and internalized the lessons from Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion? Is it easy to imagine the current Krugman writing rich multi-voiced dialogues which extend both his points and those of his intellectual opponents? Can you imagine the current Krugman writing something sufficiently multi-faceted that you might come away thinking — because of...
“Changes in income from capital gains and dividends were the single largest...”
– Thomas L. Hungerford, Congressional Research Service, ‘Changes in the Distribution of Income Among Tax Filers 1996-2006: The Role of Labor Income, Capital Income, and Tax Policy’ (pdf)
December 2011
31 posts
“…for what we spent on Iraq since 2003, we could have given every Iraqi the...”
– Michael Froomkin
“It becomes harder and harder to resist the urge to point out that the basic...”
– Charles P. Pierce
MSNBC: Mentally ill fill ERs as states cut... →
On a recent shift, a young woman with schizophrenia arrived at the hospital. She had just lost her job and apartment and was living with relatives. She could not afford the medications that were keeping her illness in check.
The woman asked Sullivan to switch her prescriptions to drugs that could be found on the $4 discount list at Wal-Mart and other discount stores.
“I didn’t feel...
Pupil performance →
Our research with aggregate country data supports the hypothesis that higher [teacher] pay leads to improved pupil performance. As an indication of the relative size of this effect, we find that a 10 per cent increase in teachers’ pay would give rise to a 5-10 per cent increase in pupil performance. Likewise, a 5 per cent increase in the relative position of teachers in the income distribution...
DeLong: Hayek's accursed love of gold →
Hayek appears to share the gold fetishism of von Mises and others: the “great monetary theorists” insist that the proper monetary policy has the money supply “controlled [so] that the total volume of all money in circulation changes in just the same way as would happen if gold alone were in circulation”.
Thus if improvements in gold mining technology halve the cost of...
“…the best way to “save” for retirement is to live in a country...”
– Yglesias
Lisa Bashert: The public library as commons →
While I was visiting the library numerous times today, I took a good look around and choked up a little. You see, I love my walkable, sustainable, public, downtown, personal, activist, beautiful library. I saw moms with small herds of kids. I saw every computer occupied. I saw super cheap used books for sale near the checkout counter. I saw the beautiful historic stenciling that’s been restored...
“And even if services don’t technically connect to each other, we’re...”
– Alexis Madrigal
Ypsi bus, a sketch
The bus running from my house in Ann Arbor to downtown Ypsilanti takes a southerly route between the mall and Meier. You don’t think of that area as being part of town or of people living there, but development is surprisingly dense. There is a lot of light industrial, more than a few sprawling and obviously cheap apartment complexes, and offices for most of the social service agencies that...
NYT: For our allies, death from above →
Foer: still searching for an IP reform movement... →
To read about IP online, everyone who ever downloaded “Who Let the Dogs Out?” from Limewire is a truth-telling revolutionary, smashing a decrepit corporate structure and ushering us into a golden age of free culture, where movies and games and albums descend from heaven in a celestial ball of light into the waiting arms of the IP warriors, who send the love out through the tubes to...
“The company’s research has shown the stomach to be the most respectful part of a...”
– Amanda Hess, explaining the rules New Sensations uses when producing porn ‘for her’
Boston Globe: Romney will not release tax data →
Romney also indicated that he would not shy away from a legal tax break that shelters partners at private equity firms, like Bain Capital, from high tax rates on the largest part of their take-home profits.
“I can tell you we follow the tax laws, and if there’s an opportunity to save taxes, we like anybody else in this country will follow that opportunity,’’ he said.
Partners at firms such as...
Salmon: The Bank of Cataragus' numbers →
How can one institutionalize that kind of citizenship? The answer is simple: credit unions. While the Bank of Cattaraugus is a prime example of a small community bank which really is doing God’s work (on a total asset base rather lower than Lloyd Blankfein’s annual salary), everything it does could also be done by a credit union, without the associated risks of the owners selling out at some...
NYRB: Do China's village protests help the regime? →
The idea is to allow people whom the authorities consider unthreatening to write about the protests and come up with useful analyses that don’t pose a challenge to one-party rule. Thus we have seen a steady stream of level-headed reporting and analysis by people like Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who specializes in rural unrest. In postings over the past ten...
CNN: Trump dumps GOP →
Donald Trump continued to tease a potential presidential run by changing his voter registration Thursday from Republican to “unaffiliated” and publicly denouncing the behavior of members of his former party.
In 2011 we continued to operate drones in Pakistan, launched a significant incursion into their airspace for the purpose of assassinating Bin Laden, and killed a number of their soldiers in a skirmish on the Afghanistan border. Pakistan has expelled our diplomats (I think), stopped letting us use their airbases, stopped letting send resupply convoys through their territory, and stopped letting us...
How to be a lying homophobic asshole Republican in...
1. Propose a ballot initiative banning gay marriage which includes vague language about the recognition of same sex relationships.
2. In the runup to the election, deny that the vague language would affect the provision of same sex domestic partner benefits to state employees.
3. Win.
4. Assert a reading of the vague language which denies same sex domestic partner benefits to state employees....
“Fear Factor doesn’t prove that, as a general matter, Americans will eat bugs for...”
– Wil Wilkinson, The really real reality of reality TV
Detroit's debt crisis even worse than thought →
A major cause of the long-term debt is ballooning pension costs. The number of retirees continues to increase, while the work force that helps pay for pension obligations has reached historic lows. The city makes health care and pension payments to more than 20,000 retirees, while only about 11,000 employees are on the active payroll. In 1975, there were two active employees for every retiree.
Good movies (i got around to seeing) in 2011
The Social Network
The Green Hornet
The Warrior’s Way
30 Minutes or Less
“Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a...”
– Jonathan Chait
USA Today: Survival of Frankincense threatened →
Washinhton Times: Senate GOP likely to rebuff... →
If no new NLRB board members are confirmed by the end of this month, the five-person board will be unable to function with only two members. A third board member, former Service Employees International Union official Craig Becker, must leave Dec. 31 when his one-year recess appointment expires.
World's Greatest Golfer Dies →
11 for 11: Used records worth a listen
Rockin’ With Reed - Jimmy Reed
Jimmy Reed turns out to be the answer to a question I’ve been asking for a while.
Waylon Jennings - Waylon Jennings
Based on the available evidence on the internet, this record doesn’t exist. Still, it’s great. It’s some kind of compilation on Vocalion of covers he recorded for Decca. The standout is Buck Owens’...
McSweeney's - LOOK, WE CAN EITHER STUDY FOR OUR... →
Frum: Don't endorse Ron Paul →
It is the lack of concern to the travails of middle-class America that “reform Republicans” should most centrally be concerned with.
And no candidate in this race–ok, except maybe the defunct Herman Cain–has been more persistently, aggressively, and forcefully heedless of those travails than Ron Paul.
Everything else that’s wrong with Paul–the paranoia, the crank theories–exists as an adjunct to...
What percentage of police shootings are justified?
Not long ago I wrote, in an offhand way, that police shootings are “often terrible.” Since then, I’ve been wondering whether I was too harsh. Certainly the shootings I hear about are terrible enough, but I’ve never made any sort of effort to figure out how representative those terrible incidents were. The one that sticks in my head, in case you were wondering, involved a...
Frum: The Coming GOP Gingrich Freakout →
The most important thing to remember about Gingrich is not the three marriages, not the dubious financial practices, not the abrupt reversals on healthcare mandates and climate change. It’s not the grandiosity of language, not the habit of casting opponents as un-American, not the lack of self-awareness that allowed him to impeach a president for lying under oath about an extramarital affair while...
Postpartisan Depression: Democrats join the war on... →
I’m guessing the official rationale here is that parents need to be informed if their 17 year old daughters are having sex. That’s very, very practical. I’m sure this will result in much closer parental guidance for their teenagers’ sexuality. Lord knows, that age group has never had sex until now but who knows what will happen if they get a “get out of jail...
November 2011
1 post
“Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one...”
– Newt Gingrich, waxing nostalgic
October 2011
6 posts
CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are... →
The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high. In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between “labor” and “capital,”...
“The term “class warfare” as Rand Paul uses it is antique. The real class war in...”
– Rod Dreher » Sex, money, and ‘class warfare’