Month: October 2010
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1098 Naysayers: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
The Sky-Is-Falling Crowd says that 1098’s income tax will be immediately extended to lower earners. If you’re so sure, here’s a chance to make a buck on your certainty. Fifty bucks, actually. Here’s the bet: If, as of April 15, 2014, Washington-state taxpayers with incomes below $200,000 (individual filers) or $400,000 (joint filers) are paying…
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Barry Ritholtz Turns It ON: “Time for Criminal Charges To Be Filed.”
Corporations that get free speech rights also have liability for their own criminal actions. Its way past time we start forcing those responsibilities to have some meaning. This is not about keeping deadbeats in their homes, as a few idiots and liars have asserted. The corporate sympathizers who are too busy fellating the bank to recognize…
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1098: If Millionaires Vote With Their Feet, They Apparently Don’t Care About Income Taxes
All the gnashing of teeth and tearing of breasts about “the most productive members of our society” voting with their feet and abandoning our state if we institute an income tax has always seemed a little … overblown. Turns out it is. If it was true, you’d expect to find a much smaller percentage of…
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Pubs Don’t Cut Spending. They Just Refuse to Pay Their Bills. Video.
Ted K gives us this in the comments: Un. B. Effing. Lievable. Brad Delong (bold is mine): As Milton Friedman liked to say, and as he did say when he — I am told — yelled at George W. Bush during his 90th birthday celebration at the White House — to spend is to tax.…
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Government Is So Inefficient and Poorly Managed
The Office of Management and Budget reporting on tracking for Recovery Act funds: Of the 74,244 prime recipients required to file last quarter, just 352 failed to file a report last quarter — that’s 99.5 percent participation. Of the 352 who failed to file, 89 percent of them — or 312 — were first-time non-reporters.…
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Is Gerrymandering the Flocking Problem?
My regular readers will know that I’m fascinated by systems with “emergent properties” — systems where a few simple rules that individuals operate by result in complex and surprisingly organized behavior by the group — group properties that don’t seem to have any obvious direct relationship to the simple rules. Birds flocking is a great…
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Who Owns Congress? A Campaign Cash Seating Chart
I’ve been meaning to write up a post on this but haven’t found time. And it pretty much speaks for itself, so I’ll just give it to you and you can do with it as you will. Congressional Seats by Top Donors to Each Seat It’s pretty clear who wins that X vs. Y encounter:…
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Why I Didn’t Write This Post (Wonky)
Re: our trade deficit with China, their undervalued currency, and their purchases of our treasuries. I queried in comments on a couple of econoblogs a few months back (with no response): why don’t we just prevent China from buying our treasuries in retaliation for their currency policy? I was going to write up the idea…
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The Economic, Political, and Intellectual Equivalent of Bloodletting
Colorado: Tax-slashing proposals scare GOP, Democrats By IVAN MORENO Associated Press Writer Businessmen gather at an empty Denver Broncos stadium, with an ominous warning: The more than 70,000 vacant seats around them represent the number of state jobs that would be lost if three tax-slashing and debt-cutting measures are approved in next month’s election. While many states…
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Liberty, Freedom, and Wealth: Americans Say Power to the People!
It drives me batty to hear so-called conservatives and libertarians prattling on about liberty and freedom without seeming to realize or even consider what seems fairly obvious to me: for the vast majority of people, liberty — the freedom to do what you want to do from day to day, year-in and year-out, and in the…
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Who Does the Senate Listen To? The Poor, the Middle Class, or the Rich?
Here’s an analysis that’s somewhat dated, but that I came across and found interesting. Data from Larry Bartels (PDF). At least during that time period, Senators of all stripes (in aggregate at least) simply ignored the opinions of low-income people. The correlations aren’t just small; they’re negative across the board. Democrats at least pay attention…
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What’s Wrong with Free Markets: “The ‘Wisdom’ of the Crowds”
This may seem obvious to many, but it’s been very clarifying for me. People often argue against the free-market system — which is based on the idea of rational actors — by saying “people are obviously not rational actors!” But that’s a stupid argument. It misses the point. Nobody thinks that everyone, always, makes rational…
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Religious Knowledge of a Devout (and Morally Committed) Atheist: 100%
My results on the latest Pew survey: Here’s how you did on these 15 questions (excerpted from the larger U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey) compared with a nationally representative sample of 3,412 adults. Read the Full Report Your responses on the quiz do NOT affect the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey’s results. Take the test here. Or…