How rich are you?
May 11th, 2010
Economics, Random
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At globalrichlist.com you can enter in your annual income and see how you rank in the world. It’s a wonderful and wonderfully designed site that aims to make you feel rich so you’ll donate to a good cause.
I’m always telling folks who fret about how little they make that we’re not just richer than most on earth, but most that ever lived. Someone making an entry level salary of $35k in DC is still in the top 5% of income earners in the world.
USA Today and the low-tax myth
May 11th, 2010
Economics, Politics
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Folks on the left this morning are having a heyday with an article appearing in USA Today with analysis that suggests that taxes are actually quite low and falling:
Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate is far below the historic average of 12% for the last half-century. The overall tax burden hit bottom in December at 8.8.% of income before rising slightly in the first three months of 2010.
The problem is that this number is so incredible it beggars belief. Not that it’s fundamentally incorrect — just that it, perhaps inadvertently, leaves readers with an impression about the size of government spending that is utterly and completely untrue.
The article does point out that consumer spending has decreased in recent years, the stimulus included some tax credits, and tax rates have become even more progressive in the past decades and heavy with credits (traditional and refundable) to the point that almost half of American tax units pay no income tax. (Granted, this last point can be used misleadingly due to the recent bipartisan consensus that the tax code is a great way to institute social programs, a view to which I’m not entirely unsympathetic.)
But taken out of context, the average USA Today reader might well walk away from a quick skim of the article thinking that the government only spends 9.2 percent of gross domestic product. Less than a dime on the dollar. A bargain!
Let’s parse this out a bit.
First of all, ceteris paribus, as personal income decreases, we’d expect the percentage of personal income collected by the federal government to decrease. That’s evidence of our highly progressive tax system. So the story isn’t really one about tax rates at all — it’s about revenues collected.
Second, readers may walk away knowing that the US government costs much more than 9.2% of national income to operate, but figure that corporations or foreigners pay the rest. In other words, “we” pay 9.2%, “they” pay the rest. It’s an iron-clad rule of public finance that corporations don’t pay taxes, people pay taxes. All tax incidence ultimately rests on a person. If you tax a corporation’s profits, for instance, the people who pay are the owners of its shares, who are (ultimately) individuals.
Third of all, it’s important to get a sense of what state and local governments collect. In 2006, state governments collected over $710 billion in taxes, around 5.4% of GDP. When you include local governments, that figure goes to $1.24 trillion, or about 9.5% of GDP. In other words, in 2006, state and federal revenues were about to the percentage of personal income collected by all levels of government in taxes in 2009. That should give you a sense of how skewed this particular figure is. All levels of government in 2009 did not cost less than state and local governments in 2006.
Fourth, the historical tables in the President’s FY2011 budget give a good sense of what tax revenues look like. In 2009, according to table 2.1, the federal government collected $2.104 trillion in revenues. Assuming a GDP of $14 trillion, that means federal revenues were 15% of national income. Including receipts on the state and local level (see the last graf), even assuming they fell to 2006 levels, this means 2009 tax revenues at all levels of government were around $3.35 trillion, or about 24% of GDP.
But perhaps governments took in surplus revenues and spent less than that? Not hardly. The 2009 federal budget deficit was $1.4 trillion, the largest since 1945 at 9.9 percent of national income, and tripling the previous year’s deficit. The states face a total shortfall of another $113 billion.
In other words, in addition to collecting about a quarter of GDP in taxes, governments in the US at all levels tacked on another 10.7% of GDP in future costs. Add that up and governments in the US spent over a third of national income in 2009. A far cry from the 9.2% that the USA Today article inadvertently implies.
I have no doubt the BEA figures are accurate and that the article’s author, Dennis Cauchon, reported them faithfully. But by not giving context and not adequately defining terms, readers can walk away with a belief that American government costs about a quarter of what it really does.
Who would you Twitter pwn?
May 11th, 2010
Technology
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If you have ever wanted Oprah Winfrey to follow you on Twitter, you might have been able to make that possible early Monday morning, when a software bug surfaced on Twitter’s Web site. … The bug was first revealed by a Turkish man who wanted to tell his friends on Twitter about a band, “Accept,” that he enjoyed listening to. When the man typed “Accept pwns” into the update box on Twitter, he noticed that a user by the name of @pwns was now following him on the site.
That’s from an NYT post on the Twitter bug that allowed one to add themselves to anyone else’s following list. If you could make someone else follow you, who would it be?
Young people’s attitudes towards the word “libertarian”
May 11th, 2010
Politics
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Many bloggers commented on last week’s Pew survey that asked whether respondents had positive or negative feelings towards the word “libertarian.” I was curious how this would break by age, and Pew kindly provided us the crosstabs, below:
Two observations. One, young people have more positive feelings towards the word “libertarian” than older Americans and fewer don’t know the word. That’s good news for libertarian brand. But two, young people seem to have more positive feelings about most words, including “progressive,” “civil liberties,” and “family values.” I wonder if young people really know what any of these words mean, or whether this reflects a certain sunny generational optimism? I’d be interested in your thoughts in the comments.
Washington Post Copies Politico?
May 11th, 2010
Random
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In the fast-paced and ever-changing media landscape, the surest strategy for a struggling news oraganization is to… copy your competitors! After last week’s announcement that Newsweek magazine is for sale because it could no long earn a profit, this week the Washington Post Co. launches a new new media project called PostPolitics that looks awefuly similar to… Politico! From a marketing email, PostPolitics is the:
“the ultimate destination for breaking political news, in-depth original reporting and analysis, from the trusted leader in political coverage.”
Now, what’s the difference between this and WashingtonPost.com?
Morning Links
May 7th, 2010
Random
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Proving once again that men and women can't be friends.
Why do we have panel discussions?
May 6th, 2010
Culture, Random
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Why do we have panel discussions? The format is a peculiar mainstay of Washington policy circles that no longer seems to make any sense.
The first problem is that participants and the audience must congregate at the same time and place. Unlike lectures, which can sometimes be enlightening, you usually get four five minute talks that are too short to adequately treat any subject, but long enough, especially in the aggregate, to bore you to tears. Everyone knows where the panelists stand on the issue, and what everyone wants is for the panel to hurry up and get to the discussion.
Then there are the dumb questions and pontifications from the audience. As a frequent participant in panels (and increasingly less frequent attendee), I can tell you that most audience members who get up to the mic will ask rhetorical questions that are really meant to make a point on one side or the other, adding little to the positions that have already been staked out. Then there are those folks who dispense with the whole question thing and proceed to give their remarks as if they were some overlooked panel member. Why do we do this to ourselves?
As I’ve noted, the valuable part of any panel discussion is the discussion part. Listening to “experts” with differing views have a conversation about a particular topic can be a great way to learn something. And that’s why we have podcasts like Econtalk, BloggingHeads.tv, and maybe even your humble servant’s Surprisingly Free Conversations. Asynchronous and ageographic (is that a word?), you can partake of them any time and any place. Q&A and audience participation can take place in the comments section of a post. Yes, panel organizers will often make recordings available online, but that just highlights the fact that the conversation should have been produced digitally from the get-go.
The explanations I can come up with are that they are a vestige of a pre-internet time of couriers and fax machines in which congregating at the same time and at the same place was the only way to consume these discussions. No doubt these gatherings also served as a great way to meet or catch up with the inhabitants of a particular field or pursuit, and the post-event reception probably remains the only other redeeming quality of panel discussions. As an introvert, though, I see the forced socializing at these events as a bug, not a feature.
British Election Forecast, or Politico Fanfic
May 6th, 2010
Politics
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I decided to put up my prediction for Ol’ Blighty’s perfectly charming dustup of an election simply because if I get it right I’ll get to point triumphantly back at this post, and if I get it wrong I’ll simply walk away and forget it. Or in other words, here are my predictions, “which later this month I will remind you of with self-satisfaction if they come to pass, or otherwise hope that you will have forgotten.”
Here we go:
Tories win overall popular vote, followed by Lib Dems, with Labour coming in third but just by a hair. Let’s say 34-29-28. BNP vote share at a percent or less, with a notable drop in areas where they won council seats in last year’s election and in Yorkshire and the Northwest which sent BNPers to Brussels.
The Tories win the popular vote but don’t have a majority in the Commons. Cameron makes a play to Clegg, who playing to script demands the introduction of PR voting as the cost of being a coalition member. Without a majority party and no coalition forthcoming, Brown is given the chance to form a government.
Before he can fail — which happens no later than losing the confidence vote after this month’s Queen’s speech — Cameron insists on a chance to form a government on the theory that the sitting prime minister only has the right to form a government if his party comes in second in votes. It has never happened that a sitting PM’s party has come in third in the vote count, no there’s no precedent for this constitutional theory either way.
Thus, Brown and Cameron both claim, in sufficiently hedged language, the right to form a government. Whitehall scrambles. Sterling drops. The Queen tries to stay out of it, and is helped when Prince Charles says something inadvised and draws attention away from her.
Ed Balls and at least one other front bencher get Portilloed. Hazel Blears is drubbed.
Tories win a clear majority of votes and seats in England, and treble their Scottish contingent to three. Lots of gumbling by Daily Mail readers about how the Celtic fringe is holding England hostage once again.
The speaker election will be unusually brutal.
Within a month, the Tories have formed a minority government, perhaps bringing a minor party or two on board for some added comfort. A snap election in 2012 returns a healthy Conservative majority.
Six degrees of Jesus
May 6th, 2010
Culture, Technology
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An intellectually stimulating iPhone and iPad game:
The basics idea behind Wiki Hunt is that you start on a Wikipedia article and try to make it to the target article in as few clicks as possible. You can play a completely random game where Wiki Hunt chooses your start page and your end page, a custom game where you pick the start and end, or my personal favorite: Six clicks to Jesus.
I wonder if something exists like this that automates Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon using the IMDB API. Read the whole article at Touch Arcade.
The best paragraph I’ve read today
May 6th, 2010
Culture, Random, Technology
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On the front page of the New York Times today about formspring.me:
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
Facebook, I can’t quit you?
May 5th, 2010
Culture, Technology
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I am this close to closing my Facebook account. They continue to make incomprehensible changes to their privacy policy and settings, so that it’s completely unclear to me which of my actions will be observable by whom.
A while back there was an app making the rounds that published to the world who visited your profile most frequently. I was identified as a frequent visitor of some friends profiles, and some people were revealed as frequent visitors to my profile. I’m not sure how they determined frequency, but it certainly shattered any conception of anonymous browsing I might have had.
Yesterday I logged in after not having done so in quite a while and was soon presented with a screen that asked me to link my profile with “pages” related to things I had listed in my profile (e.g. my high school’s page, band pages, TV show pages, etc.). There were only two choices given to me: accept “linking” my profile to the dozens of pages Facebook had chosen for me, or choose which pages I wanted to link individually. Not wanting to link to any damn thing, I chose the latter option. I was taken to a screen where all the pages were listed with a pre-checked box next to each one. In order to link to none I would have had to painstakingly uncheck all those boxes. Defaults matter and this was incredibly presumptuous. I closed the window without doing anything and I have no idea if I’m linked to any pages or not.
Now comes word from TechCrunch that a security flaw in Facebook allows anyone to see any of their friend’s live chats as they happen. Unbelievable.
Government regulation is not needed to discipline Facebook. Consumers will grow tired of being jerked around by such an insensitive and juvenile company and will find better service elsewhere. Twitter, for example, has incredibly simple and respectful privacy options.
So what’s keeping me from quitting? I don’t know really. A sneaking suspicion that I’ll miss out on something if I do. An invitation or the ability to easily look up an acquaintance’s email address. But I think I might just be exaggerating. Perhaps like James Sturn has done with the whole Internet, I should quit Facebook for at least a while and report back the consequences. Is there anything valuable I’d be giving up?
