…that’s supposed to be a good thing, right? Imagine the following: Some guy shows up at the ticket counter wanting to board a given flight. He lets the agent know that he’s carrying a concealed handgun, and his name shows up on the infamous “no-fly” list. The agent doesn’t let him board. Score one for the Department of Homeland Security, right? The system works?
Not so much. Turns out that this guy’s a federal Air Marshal — you know, the guy who’s supposed to save the day if an armed terr’ist sneaks onto the flight.
Now, fixing this situation ought to be a dirt-simple database problem, the sort of thing that any Comp. Sci. undergrad could solve three weeks into an introductory course on the subject. Instead, DHS issued a directive to “mitigate the problem”.
While we’re at it, have a heaping bowl of understatement:
“Hassles due to misidentification and the resulting necessity to stand in line to check in at the ticket counter is consistently among the deepest and most valid complaints of the traveling public,” [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff said.
Indeed. Of course, doing something useful about it — like scrapping the uselessno-flylist — is completely off the table.
I’m told by many, including the two leading Democratic Presidential candidates, that it’s “only fair” for the rich (whoever they are) to pay higher taxes than the rest of us (whoever we are). After all, Ritchie McRichass can better afford to pay higher taxes than can Joe “bitterly clinging to guns and church” Six-pack, and Ritchie up there probably only got where he is because he cheated somehow, so it’s perfectly fair to demand more of his filthy lucre at gunpoint.
Some of these thoroughly bizarre people will claim on the one hand that “the rich” ought to pay higher taxes, and on the other hand that they ought not be allowed to give to charity. Yes, really:
If asked, I’m sure most of the folks who screech about progressive taxation would tell you that they don’t have anything against rich people, not really… they just want to make sure that those with more money than they have pay their fair share. (What “fair” means in this context is somewhat obscure.)
The problem is that, simply put, higher taxes don’t translate into higher tax revenue.
Enter the Laffer curve.
Actually, wait just a sec. First we need Rolle’s Theorem. This states that if a function f is continuous and differentiable between two points a and b, and f(a) = f(b), then f must have a stationary point somewhere in between. By “continuous and differentiable” we simply mean that if you make a little change in the input, you’ll get a little change in the output.
Let’s take as our function f(x) the amount of tax revenue generated by a given income bracket at an annual income tax rate of x%. We hypothesize that f(x) is continuous and differentiable between 0 and 100 — that is, increasing or decreasing the tax rate by a small value (let’s say one thousandth of a percent) should give us a relatively small increase (or decrease) in the tax revenue generated.
If we don’t tax people in this income bracket at all, we won’t get any income tax from them, so f(0) = 0. (Remember, this is just income tax we’re talking about; if we don’t tax people’s incomes, they’ll have more money to spend, so we’ll probably get more sales tax out of them. But that’s another blog post.) At the same time, if we tax these people for all of their income… we also won’t get any income tax from them. Why bother working if you don’t get to keep any of your income? These folks will lower their incomes to a less abusive tax bracket, squirrel away bits of their income in tax shelters, or both — the end result being that nobody’s in the “pay 100%” income tax bracket, and we don’t get any money from them. So f(100) = 0 as well.
This is perhaps not the case. According to the Wikipedia entry on the Laffer curve (for which see below), “socialist states, such as the U.S.S.R., have been able to derive revenues at a 100% tax rate”. If you’re willing to drive people to work at gunpoint, this is no doubt true; I’m in the midst of re-reading Maus, and Art Spiegelman makes the point quite convincingly that people will work for nothing if the alternative is death.. I am making the perhaps dubious assumption that our progressive would-be overlords aren’t quite willing to kill people who don’t want to work for zero effective salary.
Now, it follows by Rolle’s theorem that a stationary point exists somewhere between f(0) and f(100). Either nobody’s paying any tax in this income bracket no matter what the tax rate (unlikely), or there’s a maximum value of f(x) for some x between 0 and 100. Let’s call that maximum value f(k).
In other words, if you raise income taxes on this tax bracket past k%, you start to lose money.
You don’t really need the calculus to see the truth behind this concept — it’s about as obvious as a 2×4 across the back of the head. I threw in the calculus because I’m a nerd, but also because it shows that the Laffer curve is inevitable under a quite reasonable set of assumptions.
Why do we care?
None of the “soak the rich” crowd cares about k.
If we’re out to extract from “the rich” as much income tax as we possibly can — no doubt in order to fund social programmes that will cure every ill of our modern society — we should do our damndest to find k, and thereby maximize tax income. Taxing people — even rich people — beyondk% of their income per annum is counterproductive to this goal. Raising taxes too much gets you less, not more.
It’s only interesting if your goal is not to fund universal health-care programmes or let baby boomers retire when they think they ought to be able to do so, but rather to punish those who have more shit than you do.
Hmm.
Kinda rings true, doesn’t it?
Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute explains, justifies, and develops the Laffer curve in these YouTube videos:
If you simply don’t believe me that Reagan’s tax cuts for rich people could possibly have paid for themselves, this is the one you want to watch:
Yeah, apparently food prices are rising faster than “inflation“. That won’t surprise any of us who’ve been paying the least bit of attention.
Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.
Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.
And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
These are trends that have been in place for some time.
And if you are hoping they will pass, here’s the bad news: They may actually accelerate.
Those figures are averages across the United States. They don’t necessarily correspond to local figures. Good luck, folks, You’re On Your Own.
Well, no, that’s not entirely true. The Canadian government, at least, is looking out for its citizens by… uh, well, by artificially inflating pork prices.
I am shitting thee negative. People actually think this way.
The Canadian government announced that it would pay pork producers as much as $50 million to kill 150,000 pigs by fall. It’s an effort to reduce supply in order to raise the price of pork and help struggling hog farmers, says Clare Schlegel, president of the Canadian Pork Council.
[...]
Schlegel says that is not the case for many other farmers who are facing three main obstacles. First is the unprecedented rise in the value of the Canadian dollar — now trading about par with the U.S. dollar — which means pork prices north of the border have halved. Meanwhile, feed prices have almost doubled, which Schlegel says is primarily due to ethanol demand and fuel policies.
Thirdly, Schlegel says, a cure for a difficult hog disease called circle virus has worked “wonderfully” — and cruelly — for the industries in Canada and the United States. “Our pigs are healthy, happy — they’re growing and making it to market,” he says.
Yeah, you read that correctly. The three biggest problems facing hog farmers today are (a) government intervention in the private sector, (b) government intervention in the private sector, and (c) healthier hogs.
I just don’t know what to say to that.
I suppose that perhaps some of the hog farmers who can no longer make enough money selling hogs could perhaps switch to corn, or canola, or some other heavily subsidized ethanol-producing crop. Heck, maybe they could even get government money to make that switch!
They surely can’t sell their excess pork to markets around the world where people have been rioting for lack of food. That would, uh… disenfranchise the local farmers who haven’t been able to keep up with demand! Or something:
As for a noble goal of, for example, shipping the food to Haiti’s poor, Schlegel says that would be impractical, citing food safety reasons, matters of cost and potential problems from flooding a fragile market with free meat. “We don’t want to simply transfer our pain to farmers in other parts of the world.”
Okay, okay, I was too hasty: it’s apparent that no-one’s considered selling this extra pork to those who want to buy it. They’ve only considered giving it away, and immediately rejected the notion as a heinous monstrosity which would undercut local farmers. Selling pork at market price is apparently completely unthinkable.
Which may be why we have a problem in the first place.
I don’t see this doing Clinton much good. It surely doesn’t hurt her chances, but those chances have been negligible for quite some time. It’s damn near impossible for her to win the nomination based on anything but superdelegates — whose contribution would naturally be tainted by “party insider politics” and the like.
The continued campaign isn’t doing the Democrats much good. Both Democratic candidates are getting plenty of exposure telling the world what an awful President the other would make (they’re probably both right, of course), while McCain’s largely untouched by speculation (no doubt correct) about what an awful President he would make. At this point, I’m inclined to wish confusion and discord upon all three of them.
Tasers ought to be wonderful things. They supplement — and in many cases, replace — other, less effective weapons in a police officer’s force continuum. Rather than resort to unreliable and indiscriminate pepper spray or inflict potentially permanent crippling damage with a nightstick, cops with tasers can — from a distance — gain a five-second window of control over violent people who don’t need to be shot. Yes, tasers occasionally kill people without obvious reason, but it wouldn’t shock me (heh heh) to discover that cops kill people with tasers at about the same rate as they’ve previously killed people with batons and pepper spray.
That’s how things are supposed to work, anyway.
Note the term “force continuum”, above. Legal and ethical use of force is not an all-or-nothing prospect; if some twelve-year-old delinquent eggs your house on Hallowe’en, you’re not to light up the little shit with thirty rounds of TAP, even if you are permitted to keep a poodle-shooter for home defence. Similarly, if you can resolve a situation with harsh language, nuking the site from orbit is considered unsporting.
In particular, weapons like pepper spray, batons, and tasers are only to be used against violent people.
Refusing to pay a SkyTrain fare is not generally considered “violent”.
Transit police have fired Tasers 10 times since January last year, and three cases involved non-violent suspects, according to internal police reports obtained by CBC News using access to information laws.
In one case, a person ran from transit cops during a check for free-riders and “the Taser was deployed as the subject fled,” the documents say. Another person who didn’t pay the fare was arrested but “grabbed onto the platform railing and refused to let go … the Taser was deployed.”
I love that language. “…the Taser was deployed.” No indication that someone “deployed” the Taser. No agency involved. No target, either — that Taser wasn’t deployed into someone’s flesh, it was simply “deployed”. People who are proud of what they’ve done do not write reports like those.
Of course, according to our benevolent protectors the South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service, no-one writes reports like those. It’s all a fabrication:
The South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority Police Service, the police patrolling Greater Vancouver’s TransLink system, defended their use of the stun guns at the news conference, saying that they are used only according to a written policy.
“We have tens of thousand of contacts with the public every year. We have deployed the Taser 10 times,” Houston said. “We do not, have not and will never Taser those in our care for the non-payment of fares.”
Picking on mainstream-conservative chickenhawks is generally about as sporting as making fun of the retarded, which is why you don’t see much of it here. I am, however, prepared to make an exception.
If all you’ve done to “support our troops” is pasted one of those yellow-ribbon bumper stickers onto the back of your minivan and you’ve ever questioned someone else’s support of those self-same troops, I hope you lose your legs at the hip in an IED attack.
If you want to actually support the troops, rather than just give yourself a minimal (and, frankly, insulting) excuse to get smug and self-righteous, head over to AnySoldier.com or to the CFPSA website and step the fuck up. Otherwise:
It’s been a long while since I’ve had occasion to write a good knock-down, drag-out “people are stupid about being healthy” post here. Fortunately, that drought (or should I say deficiency) has come to an end.
(This is perhaps the first “won’t someone please think of the children?” post on Blunt Object. Sorry about that!)
The two articles linked above present a familiar theme: people don’t know shit about what it means to eat a healthy diet, and substitute feel-good bullshit (“it’s organic, it must be healthy”), slickly-marketed pap (“the ad says it’s good for you, and has people with visible abs and lots of plants on it”), and inscrutable superstition (“fiber is good for you, fat is bad for you”) instead. The problem, as those link titles will tell you, is that rather than simply fuck themselves up with their poorly-researched food foolishness, these people are inflicting what are essentially starvation diets upon children in their care. They’re feeding toddlers calorie- and nutrient-sparse rabbit food in an attempt to “cure childhood obesity”.
Let me be clear: this isn’t a cheap attempt at emotional manipulation based on evolved tendencies to protect children. It’s not the “people are fucking up children” part that offends me, it’s the “people are fucking up other people in their care” part. Morally speaking, things would be the same if people were feeding adults ill-considered diets under the aegis of “healthy.”
Eating a healthy diet basically means eating what your body needs to function, and not eating so much of any given thing that it becomes a problem. This isn’t a constant thing — your body’s needs change over time — and it isn’t obvious either, but if you look at food as a way to fuel your metabolism rather than… well, whatever people are thinking when they go to McDonalds, it loses its mystery and starts to seem almost straightforward. (Diet is much like economics in that the inscrutable becomes obvious when you do some research and start knowing what the hell you’re talking about.)
Consider, for example, this passage from the first article:
[P]re-school children have a high energy and nutrient requirement. Because they have a small stomach and a relatively under-developed gut, they cannot consume large quantities of food at a time but need frequent small meals and snacks throughout the day.
High energy requirements and small-capacity digestive systems would suggest that toddlers could benefit from energy-dense foods, like fatty meats. Considering also that toddlers are growing (in body and mind — rather, in muscle and brain mass), they might just need protein and EFAs. These little yard monsters need pork chops and prawn rings, not broccoli.
Of course, you’re not going to hear any of this through the usual channels. Endocrinology and developmental physiology aren’t sufficiently accessible to find their way onto the talk-show circuit. You have to seek it out.
Vancouver has a low-rent housing problem: there’s more demand than supply. As Vancouver’s housing market grows, particularly in anticipation of the 2010 Winter Olympics, that supply shrinks further: developers buy up low-rent and abandoned property near the downtown core and turn it into what they hope will be profitable condominia and the like.
Suppose you don’t like this trend. (You surely wouldn’t be alone.) Suppose further that you resolve to do something about it. You might volunteer your time and build more affordable housing. If that seems to reasonable and effective to fully exhaust your anger, you might instead occupy buildings under threat of demolition.
Or, if you’ve searched your body for gonads and your soul for sisu and come up empty twice, you might whine to the United Nations.
Three groups in Vancouver are launching a human rights complaint with the United Nations over the impact of the 2010 Winter Olympics on affordable housing in the Downtown Eastside.
Now, I wouldn’t expect much from the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. As I’ve mentioned earlier, the UN HRC’s only notable achievements are (a) “urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion”, and, thereby, (b) pissing off every legitimate human rights group. The UN HRC’s qualifications to deal with Vancouver’s housing issues are therefore somewhat obscure.
This doesn’t worry our three groups, however. See, this is merely a publicity stunt:
The complaint is designed to embarrass the Canadian government and draw attention to a lack of social housing in the city’s poorest neighbourhood, the groups said Sunday.
[...]
“It’s not court. It’s not a legally binding conclusion,” said [University of British Columbia professor Michael] Byers, who’s head of the Global Politics and International Law at UBC.
“We are talking about going to the court of global public opinion,” he said. “It’s a different thing, but I think it does offer some promise and promise is what we need in this desperate situation.”
Buying a lottery ticket offers some promise of getting one out of debt. I would have thought that action leading to tangible progress would be more useful in a desperate situation than promise, but then again I’m just a grad student.
“Maybe the UN can embarrass the federal government,” said Jean Swanson, a co-ordinator of the Carnegie Carnegie Community Action Project.
“Maybe it can embarrass the country in the eyes of the world. Maybe it can embarrass the province. Maybe it can embarrass the city.”
I should think that any contact with the UN Human Rights Council would be embarrassing. These are, after all, the people who’ve found time to insist that faith is too fragile a concept to weather public criticism, but doesn’t have the balls to condemn Sudan’s actions in Darfur. I suspect, however, that this isn’t what Swanson had in mind.
The problem here — if you, astute reader, haven’t figured it out by now — is that these folks aren’t doing fuck-all directly to solve the problem. Instead, they’re raising a fuss in the hopes of getting someone else (predictably, government) to solve the problem for them. Anyone with a news addiction like mine will have seen this dribble over and over and over again, and it’s driving me batshit.
If I didn’t recognize the Golden Age fallacy, I’d claim that this abandonment of agency is the curse of modern times, but I suspect that this has been going on ever since some critters evolved pack behaviour. It’s easy to imagine feral dogs pulling this shit: “Goddammit, I’m hungry,” whines one. “Maybe if I whine loud enough the alpha will kill a squirrel for me.” It’s clearly an evolved trait.
Humans, however, are well-equipped for introspection: we can’t use evolutionary tendency as an excuse.
When one group pulls this crap, it’s merely pathetic. When everyone pulls this crap, it’s destructive. People keep passing the buck from charity to organization to local, provincial, and federal governments, then back down (or around or across) until the sheer volume of histrionics and aggregation of bureaucracy has everyone convinced that someone (we’re not sure quite who) is doing something (we’re not sure quite what) about the issue. Inevitably, someone notices that the problem still exists, and the cycle starts anew, accumulating another ring of rhetoric and paper-pushers like a mighty oak growing in a fertile field of BULLSHIT.
And, of course, nothing gets done until some brave individual notes that he or she is properly equipped for procreation and takes decisive action.
