numbskulduggery

"All of my friends turned out to be insurance men."

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:48:40 -0500

“All of my friends turned out to be insurance men.”

- John Prine

This song has been in my head for days…

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:52:41 -0500

This song has been in my head for days…

Datsyuk 2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:47:00 -0500

Datsyuk 2012

Datsyuk 2011

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:46:00 -0500

Datsyuk 2011

Datsyuk 2010

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:45:00 -0500

Datsyuk 2010

This exists.

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:49:05 -0500

This exists.

From dogsagainstromney.com

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:19:00 -0500

From dogsagainstromney.com

Effective tax rates and the corporate income tax, or how to keep someone else from saying what they mean by not meaning what you say

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:40:42 -0500

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 good years was about 35%, and that it fell to around 15% when I could only afford to eat ramen.

Those were the days!

It turns out we’ve all been wrong about the meaning of an effective tax rate all these years. If you are really rich then your effective tax rate includes another kind of taxes as well — corporate income taxes.

You may not have heard this before, and the numbers are kind of tricky, so bear with me while I explain the new math. We’ll have to start by getting the lay of the land.

To begin with, really rich people aren’t paid salaries in money like you and me. Instead, really rich people are paid fancy pieces of paper that are much more precious than money because those fancy pieces of paper increase in value over time and sometimes shoot out cash like an ATM even after the really rich person has stopped doing any work at all.

Plus also, owing to the fancyness of the pieces of paper and maybe just a touch of influence peddling, the never-ending stream of cash that the extremely wealthy person no longer has to work for is only taxed at about a fifteen percent rate.

Here is where things get murky. You see, really rich people aren’t just given fancy pieces of paper that continuously increase in value and shoot out cash for nothing. They get those fancy pieces of paper in exchange for doing the sorts of things that make other extremely rich people’s fancy pieces of paper grow in value and spit out ever larger piles of cash. And the sort of thing you do to make that happen is run a corporation. I know it sounds hard, but at the end of the day all it requires is going to the right schools and making it through lunch.

Or maybe it’s terribly difficult. Honestly I don’t know. The important point is that however tough it is to wrest profit from the blood soaked fingers of third world children, the government has in its grand majesty seen fit to impose a tax on the activity. This is called the corporate income tax and if corporations did their taxes with the sophistication of penniless losers like me, then those corporations would pay somewhere between 30 and 35% of their profits in tax.

Now, back to the fancy pieces of paper. One of the things that makes those pieces of paper fancy is that their value is sorta-kinda related to how big corporate profits are, and the rate at which those pieces of paper spit out cash also bears a kinda-sorta relationship to profits. Nobody can say exactly what those relationships are, but we do know that whatever the market decides the answers are will be right in the long run, plus also right in the short run given appropriate discounting for future uncertainty, because markets are efficient.

In contrast, the pieces of paper that not really rich people are paid in — money — are only related to profits in that if a really rich person can make more profits by not paying that paper then bye bye birdie. Because of this (the polite way to say it is that wages are paid before profits), the corporate income tax is irrelevant to the tax burden of wage earners, but it really matters to really rich people.

Obviously, things are more complicated than this. The key to it all is that the fancy pieces of paper that really rich people are paid in have very special properties. If you were to take a look at one, and this may be tough to do if you are not a really rich person yourself since these pieces of paper tend to be held in lockboxes, what you will notice is that each of those fancy pieces of paper is inscribed — I have been told in that the inscription is in gold — with the name of the corporation that issued it.

This inscription has a number of qualities which would appear magical to anyone not familiar with modern technologies of finance and political economy. It is the inscription which entitles the holder of these very fancy pieces of paper to stand in line at the rich guy ATM when dividends are paid, and it is in virtue of this inscription that these pieces of paper are traded in the market and tend to become more valuable year after year.

Most surprisingly, and one imagines painfully for those unfortunate men and women of leisure who are burdened with an overabundance of these fancy pieces of paper, the inscription creates such a close bond between the corporation named and the holder of the piece of paper that the full bite of any taxes paid by the corporation are felt by the holder of the piece of paper.

It’s true!

This is what used to be called ‘double taxation’ and it is the spectre of double taxation which has haunted the lives of plutocrats since the dawn of the sixteenth amendment, burdened as those plutocrats are by a capital gains tax rate that approaches the vig on a really first rate credit card well in reach of the average middle class family if they would only show a little bit of discipline.

Owing to this close bond which, again, does not hold between the corporation and those actually employed by it, the effective tax rate of anyone who holds a fancy piece of paper includes in it the taxes paid by the corporation named on that fancy piece of paper. So it is written, so let it be done. The capital gains rate falleth, but double taxation hath already taken the rich man’s dope stupid gold away.

And so you see even though Mitt Romney paid less that 15% taxes on the money that spawned like tribbles from his very fancy pieces of paper, the corporations named on those fancy pieces of paper might each have paid as much as 35% taxes on their profits. Thus Mitt Romney, who one might even say is the same person as those corporations named on his fancy pieces of paper, pays taxes at as much as a 50% rate, as far as he knows.

This is, as we now say, his effective tax rate.

Some would suggest that this new meaning for effective tax rate, coming into vogue as it has just after Romney’s apparently low tax rate came to national attention, has been introduced in a cynical effort to obscure the issue at hand. Others, and whether they are stupid or dishonest is not for me to say, would argue instead that this enrichment of the concept of an effective tax rate adds balance and fairness to the national debate.

Whatever. The point is something about his taxes is the point. You know what I mean. Eastasia has always pegged its currency to Oceana’s dollar, and my eyes glaze over when I try to remember why we used to care.

There is a meeting here tonight - Joe & Eddie

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:50:04 -0500

There is a meeting here tonight - Joe & Eddie

A million could do it

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 04:27:00 -0500

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 low end, but the point is that you’d expect organizers to get it together to make a list.

Can you imagine it? One million organizers knocking on 120 million doors and putting together one million meetings. That’s how we get to democracy.

Reuters: Romney's steel skeleton in Bain's closet

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:42:20 -0500

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. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Kaplan: The coming war over the Pentagon budget

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:41:40 -0500

Kaplan: The coming war over the Pentagon budget

"I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:21:21 -0500

“I will go to the NAACP convention and tell the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.”

- Newt Gingrich

Krugman: The mendacity of dopes

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 19:42:16 -0500

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 ignorance when I see them. So?
Cowen apparently wants me to make the best case for the opposing side in policy debates. Since when has that been the rule? I’m trying to move policy in what I believe to be the right direction — and I will make the best honest case I can for moving in that direction.

Cowen on Krugman

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:46:00 -0500

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 the piece itself — that the opposing point of view was the better one?
Krugman has shown a remarkable and impressive capacity to reinvent himself, more than once. He could reinvent himself again — in a truly Humean direction — and become the most important American public intellectual — and perhaps intellectual — of his time. Or he could keep his current status as a sharp and brilliant someone who has an enormous number of followers but relatively little influence over actual events, and perhaps, like most of us, won’t be read much fifty years from now.

"Changes in income from capital gains and dividends were the single largest contributor to rising..."

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:57:59 -0500

“Changes in income from capital gains and dividends were the single largest contributor to rising income inequality between 1996 and 2006.”

- 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)

"…for what we spent on Iraq since 2003, we could have given every Iraqi the equivalent of their..."

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:02:42 -0500

“…for what we spent on Iraq since 2003, we could have given every Iraqi the equivalent of their share of GDP every year until now, and it would have cost about the same as what we spent.”

- Michael Froomkin

"It becomes harder and harder to resist the urge to point out that the basic political and economic..."

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:49:12 -0500

“It becomes harder and harder to resist the urge to point out that the basic political and economic philosophy of modern “conservatism” is flatly sociopathic, but the society with which their policies would leave us is a desiccated moonscape of blasted promises and broken citizens, a Dresden of the national soul. ”

- Charles P. Pierce

MSNBC: Mentally ill fill ERs as states cut services

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:39:55 -0500

MSNBC: Mentally ill fill ERs as states cut services:

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 comfortable doing that,” Sullivan said, noting that emergency physicians are being asked to deliver specialized care that should be handled by a psychiatrist.

He found a healthcare facility about 25 miles away with a psychiatrist who could help, but even that presented a problem for the woman, who had no way of getting to the appointment.

Pupil performance

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:26:22 -0500

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 would increase pupil performance by around 5-10 per cent.