There are a couple of particularly interesting stats in the Spending and Taxes commentaries I posted last week. The first relates to the percentage of income individuals in different income brackets pay in state and local taxes. The bottom quintile of income earners pay 12% of their income in state …
Nate Silver has an article in today’s New York Times Magazine and a nifty interactive web site where you can pick the growth that you expect in the economy along a slider, and your expectations of President Obama’s approval rating, and it will show you the chance that any given Republican candidate …
U.S. Federal Spending in Fiscal Year 2010 was $3,456 B. 20% to Defense 20% to Social Security 23% to Medicare and Medicaid 6% to Interest on the Debt 12% for Other Mandatory 19% for Discretionary U.S. Federal Tax Receipts for Fiscal Year 2010 were $2,162 B. That covers about 60% of spending. …
Adjusted Gross Income and Federal Income Taxes in 2010 The top 1% of income earners in America earned 16.9% of all adjusted gross income and paid 34.3% of all federal income taxes for Tax Year 2009. The top 5% of income earners, including the top 1%, earned 31.7% of all AGI …
Jonathan Haidt devotes a chapter to Reciprocity in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. Reciprocity is the glue which holds large societies, of certain other animals as well as of humans, together; lack of reciprocity, tit-for-tat, is what keeps them apart. Reciprocity, and its absence, seems to be what is driving …
James Guthrie writes an article, Education Reform Need Not Be Costly, which I found in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune. In it he states that the main element in improving education is a passionate teacher, and that we can improve education by improving our teacher corps without it being very expensive. …
I learned a few things from reading Niall Ferguson’s column in Newsweek (31 Oct 2011): The well-being of the nation depends on the generosity of the wealthy. Social mobility is lower in the US than in Canada and Europe. Teacher’s unions are the reason why students in poor neighborhoods can’t …
There is a review of the new film “Anonymous” in the newspaper. I haven’t seen the film, but as a former Literature major I am not unaware of the various theories surrounding the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work. In most cases the storyline is, “Shakespeare is a commoner and thus …
I know it’s no longer a new article (October 16, 2010), but I just read and want to comment around Jonathan Haidt’s What the Tea Partiers Really Want, from The Wall Street Journal. Karma is the word he thinks describes how tea partiers and conservatives view the world. “The law …
Robert Reich writes in his column, Progressives Push Forward as Regressives Push Back, in today’s newspaper that “Progressives believe in openness, equal opportunity, and tolerance.” This part of the quote is at the intersection of politics and, in this case, personal psychology. Progressive is a personality type; progressive politics is …
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