TAXATION: In the sense that I write this as a graduate student, I'm writing as a poor person, rather than the student of any particular discipline. I'm also a reside in a state (and am a resident of another state) where there is no income tax, but in the former there is a sales tax of 8.5%. In a sense, this is regressive because poor people (like me) tend to spend more of their (our? my?) income. Generally speaking, consumption taxes are bad, because they pervert the prices of goods, and lead to consumption distortion, which is not optimal. That said, the government is going to have some expenditure (outside of re-allocating because of externalities and public goods), and, in principle, the best way to pay for this is a lump sum tax--a.k.a., a poll tax. Paying for things this way (rather justly) has negative connotations. I went through all of this paragraph to essentially re-tell (Isaiah Berlin's reading of) Macchiavelli: two separate ends are likely to have two separate means. Trying to develop a tax system that subscribes to some (poorly developed) sense of social justice is unlikely to be theoretically economically efficient.

My personal screed on taxation: make it much simpler, so we can get rid of the grossly wasteful industry of tax preparation. (It's essentially billions of dollars spent to fill out paperwork.) Perhaps we should have a couple of loop-holes for a few things, but each extra book that constitutes the tax code costs us in two ways: (1) it means we spend more on tax preparation; and (2) it means that it makes sense for more people to not pay taxes. (This is particuarly true for Argentina, which has a very poor rate of tax receipts collected and perhaps the most Byzantine tax code in the Western hemisphere.) This is to say, the proper response to some of these "statistics" is a less cumbersome federal government instead of a more aggressive, nuanced one.

We should not tax services, if we find it worthwhile to tax goods. Why is it more just that we tax cantelope more so that we can tax manicures less?

I also don't understand why this editorial only supports federal change. My initial thought is that it's a lot easier to get frothy at GWB, then to consider how to use local government for one's ends--that is to say, laziness. How is it any easier to convince congress to change the tax system then a local state legislator, or a city system? That criticism is should also be leveled at the rather facile level of statistics used here. Perhaps the reason that this author is being kept out of the media is, to borrow from Shakespeare, not in his/her stars but in his/herself. (Of course, I am "publishing" this in a blog.)


posted by Tom at 5:20 PM

CNN.com - Man sets new Donkey Kong record - Jul. 17, 2003
Oh, to have this sort of free time on my hands.

Then again, if I have to look like this guy, I'll pass, thanks.
posted by Jake at 2:15 PM

Sure to enrage at least one local blogger, a modern Progressive view on taxation:

We see taxation as an investment, but many folks see it as money down a rat hole. To the extent that the public debate on taxes centers upon trying to redefine terms, we're going to face an uphill and, ultimately, losing battle. The other side owns the airwaves and controls the print media. All we have are internet sites that appeal only to the better educated and more affluent voting blocs - basically the same blocs that already agree with our side of the argument.

Pardon me, my affluent, Progressive comrade, but go tax yourself.
posted by Biggie at 12:03 PM

Larry Wall recently gave his seventh annual, very readable, "State of the [Perl] Onion" address. Perl is a scripting language represented by a camel in the O'Reilly pantheon.

During the speech, he quoted in jest:

We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing


People have attributed this to bunches of folks, but best I can tell it's annonymous. Ask Google, and it'll tell you it was Mother Teresa. Not quite Googlewashing, but surely a related phenomenon.
posted by Biggie at 8:58 PM

If only Robert McNamara had listened to them, instead of passing them off as a wan Beatles' rip-off.

I should also note that I'm very disappointed that nobody mentioned that Monday was Bastille Day--or, as I like to think of it, Eastern Orthodox July 4th. I would have done that, but I've been busy researching photos per Eric's request, and preparing for my legal defense against false sexual assault charg--oh, wait. Sorry. I'm confusing my life with that of Kobe Bryant. I should have the Israeli picts soon, though . . .
posted by Tom at 9:15 PM

I might be going blind, but at least I'm not going to get prostate cancer.
posted by Matt at 7:21 PM

MTV.com - News -Live Avril Tracks On iTunes Include Green Day Cover
Please. Spare me.
For those not inspired to click, the topic not being geopolitics and all that, the cover is "Basket Case" (My eyes feel like they're gonna bleed... and so on).
Up until this point, everything was positive about iTunes. If I had a Mac I'd be all up in it. I'd still be all up in it, just... not for this garbage.



To think - she's making obscene money off a derivative of an art form - punk - whose community prides itself on not "selling out", on a cover of a song from a band who said punk community claims "sold out", yet has elevated the form and made it accessible like no other band ever has. She, meanwhile, helps tear it down.
Hey, it's summer, this is as deep as I get.
posted by Jake at 8:01 PM

Where're the damn sympathizers who took us off our intra-day high?
posted by Biggie at 4:33 PM

Welcome, Tom!



From In Defence of Global Capitalism:

In particular, the world is said to have become increasingly unfair. The chorus of the debate on the market economy runs: "The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." If anything this is regarded as a dictate of natural law, not a thesis to be argued. If we look beyond the catchy slogans and study what has actually happened in the world, we find this thesis to be a half-truth. The first half is true: the rich have indeed grown richer. Not all of them everywhere, but generally speaking. Those of us who are privileged to live in affluent countries have grown appreciably richer in the past few decades. So too have the Third World rich. But the second half is, quite simply, wrong. The poor have not, generally speaking, come to be worse off in recent decades. On the contrary, extreme poverty has diminished, and where it was quantitatively greatest -- in Asia -- many hundreds of millions of people who, barely twenty years ago, were struggling to make ends meet have begun to achieve a secure existence and even a modest degree of affluence. Global misery has diminished and the great injustices have started to tremble. This opening chapter will contain a long succession of figures and trend descriptions, but it has to in order to refute the very widespread fallacy that exists concerning the world’s condition.

Between 1965 and 1998, the average world citizen’s income practically doubled, from 2,497 to 4,839 dollars, corrected for purchasing power and in fixed money terms. This has not come about through the industrialised nations multiplying their incomes. During this period the richest one-fifth of the world’s population increased their average income from 8,315 to 14,623 dollars, i.e. by roughly 75 per cent. For the poorest one-fifth of the world’s population, the increase has been faster still, with average income rising during the same period from 551 to 1,137 dollars, i.e. more than doubling. World consumption today is more than twice what it was in 1960.

Six Asians in ten were extremely poor in 1975. Today’s figure is fewer than two out of ten.

Calorie intake in the Third World has risen by 30 per cent per capita since the 60s. According to FAO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, 960 million people in the developing countries were undernourished in 1970. In 1991 the figure was 830 million, falling by 1996 to 790 million. In proportion to population this is an immensely rapid improvement. Thirty years ago nearly 37 per cent of the population of the developing countries were afflicted with hunger. Today’s figure is 18 per cent. Many? Yes. Too many? Of course. But the number is rapidly declining. It took the first two decades of the 20th century for Sweden to be declared free from chronic malnutrition. In only 30 years the proportion of hungry in the world has been reduced by half, and it is expected to decline further, to 12 per cent, by 2010. There have never been so many of us on earth, and we have never had such a good supply of food.

Today there are nearly 900 million illiterate adults. That sounds a lot, and indeed it is, but it represents a heavy decrease, from 70 per cent of the population of the developing countries in the 1950s to between 25 and 30 per cent today. The very rapid spread of literacy in the world today is readily apparent from an examination of literacy rates for different generations. Where the youngest people are concerned, illiteracy is rapidly disappearing.

&c.

From the World Bank, The World Development Report and
from the UN Development Programme, The Human Development Reports
posted by Biggie at 12:59 PM

We enjoyed a par BookTV weekend.

Dr. French of the US Naval Academy gave an excellent talk on The Code of the Warrior. She skillfully overcame my vicseral antipathy toward philosophers and ethicists, leaving me convinced that her work has relevance!

46 Pages is a new book on Thomas Paine's leaflet Common Sense. Common Sense sold 500,000 copies in the North American colonies of Great Britain while those colonies had about two million colonials -- many of whom were illiterate. I cannot convey, as the author did, how the attitude of the colonies pivoted so completely on this document.

Someone mentioned, in passing, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. I do wish they would show some pictures from the damn thing. This book describes(?) photographs(?) Israeli settlements in the occuppied West Bank, architecturally. It paints the settlements as military in nature.

Also, en pasant, was In Defence of Global Capitalism, but maybe you already guessed that. I do hope you'll forgive the humongoloid excerpts, but I have a special place in my deceitful heart for statistics.
posted by Biggie at 12:58 PM