perfidy

By way of a Spoons post back in December, we learn of an intriguing new meme invented over at Samizdata:

Why not call the EU the Belgian Empire?

Heh.

In reading through the backlog of posts that I ignored for over a month, I found this gem. Pete Rose has always annoyed me, largely because he played for the Reds. Also, because he is an egomaniacal shitranch.

Once, I heard a radio sports guy say something like this:

If it wasn't for baseball, Pete Rose would either be working a gas station, or robbing it.

While Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Darryl Strawberry, Gaylord Perry, Doc Ellis, and David Wells were certainly not good role models for the kiddies, the fact is they did not commit the cardinal sin of baseball. Ever since the black sox episode back in '19, screwing with the integrity of the game is the biggest no-no. That's why Shitranch Pete is not in the hall, while some who are arguably worse people (Cobb, for instance) are. Rose picked the wrong sin.

If the President announces that he wants to send a mission to Mars, I will be happy. However, there are many things that could taint that happiness. If the time frame is twenty years, it will mean that the announcement is a publicity stunt. There is no way that a twenty-year program will happen. It will just result in endless expense on paper studies and research programs, like we had with the space station; and likely end with an ill-conceived and poorly executed mission, like the space shuttle.

If the reorganization of NASA that is being hinted at is underwhelming, then I think that again, it is mere publicity. The lion's share of money that NASA has been given has been spent on two questionable ventures - the ISS and the Shuttle. NASA likes to point to these as its major accomplishments, but anyone who thinks even moderately long on the matter will realize that for billions of dollars of our money, we have gotten this:

1. An inefficient and costly space transportation system that has resulted, so far, in the deaths of fourteen American astronauts.
2. A space station that is inadequate for any conceivable useful purpose, and whose primary justification has always been that it is a destination for the shuttle.

The real successes, post Apollo, have been in the unmanned space exploration side of NASA: Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, Pathfinder/Sojourner and many others. For a fraction of the cost, these missions have produced several orders of magnitude more scientific information than the manned space flight program, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Many have used this fact to argue against manned space exploration, but this does not necessarily follow. Part of the problem is NASA, which has evolved into a typical government bureaucracy. The shuttle and the ISS look like committees designed them for the simple reason that committees did design them. Part of the problem is that NASA was never given a mandate for a follow up goal after the moon. NASA scientists and engineers had an impressive array of follow on missions in mind in the early seventies, but the Nixon and subsequent administrations squelched those dreams quickly, and much of the heart went out of NASA.

Given a proper goal and a short but realistic timeframe, NASA could do the job of getting us to Mars. However, we could easily run into the same problems as we did after Apollo, namely having achieved something truly incredible, only to find that in the process we did not create the means to repeat the feat, or even to use technologies for other purposes. Any grand scheme for Mars exploration would require that this be taken into account.

I have argued in this venue that NASA should be dismembered. On the eve of a possible Mars announcement, this is truer than ever. Significant reform for NASA means dismemberment. (You can see my thoughts about this here.) If we attempt to go to Mars the way we have traveled to Low Earth orbit, it is a guarantee of enormous expense and likely many deaths.

There is, however, some hope. Bush has talked about private space initiatives before. If, as part of his plan, he hopes to have private industry take over (or at least design the vehicles for) travel between Earth and the Mars mission assembly site, we have hope. If the plan includes testing equipment on the moon, and building an infrastructure that allows relatively cheap and reliable movement of people and supplies between earth orbit and the lunar surface, then there is hope.

In short, I would love for Mankind to set foot on Mars. I want an actual human being to get out of his lander, plant a flag on the surface, look upon his surroundings and wonder and say (if only to himself), “Holy shit, I’m on Mars!” This is something that no probe or robot can do, and it is something that we can all understand, and imagine that we are there too. It becomes something transcendent, in a way, that we all share. We can say that we went to Mars, and feel a part of it.

But for all the stupendous expense, I pray that we get something more out of it. I hope we get Pan Am spaceliners and Hiltons in orbit. LunarDisney, and vacations in space. Factories in space where pollution is just insulation. High tech research labs in orbit. Farside observatories that reach into the depths of space and time. I want the Mars mission to force the creation of private enterprise in space. Because I want to go, and the government will never make it cheap enough for me.

Over in the comments, I have been getting back in the game as it were, reentering the great game of blogging.

Ross made the perceptive comment that Social Security taxes and payroll taxes are way too high. (Of course, all taxes are way too high...) And also that the burden of these taxes falls largely on the the lower reaches of the income scale. When you add income and payroll taxes together, according to Ross' numbers it means that we already have, effectively, a flat tax.

Ross, being a liberal, draws exactly the wrong conclusions from this insight. (Ross, I don't think an unbiased observer would include you in "us poor folks" any more than me, or even Johno for that matter.)

So, the various income groups in this country end up paying about the same percentage of their income to the government - just under a third. That's sick. It's even more sick when you realize that that percentage only includes direct taxes on income. Both the rich and the poor pay significantly more than that. The rich get nailed on investment taxes, and on luxury taxes. The poor get nailed on FICA, sales taxes and sin taxes. Everyone gets nailed on taxes on corporations that affect the costs of goods and services. It is not an exaggeration to say that most Americans pay somewhere around half of their income in taxes to the government. Only the very rich and the very poor escape this.

Ross says:

Super-kean-fine, government revenue needs to drop. I say we start with the folks at the bottom.

No, we reduce taxes for everyone. Nothing else is fair. No one deserves to have their tax burden completely relieved while others continue to pay. We are all citizens.

Elections are bought and paid for by people in the top income brackets. Explain to me why they shouldn't be responsible for most of the bills when they come due.

First, because that's not true. And second, we're all citizens, equal under the law.

As outlined in the posting, we already have a flat tax system when you take the social security system into account. Poor folks pay it, rich folks don't.

Yes, but a singularly stupid, Byzantine and labor intensive flat tax that has uncounted loopholes, exceptions and complicated rules. A flat tax system that wastes millions of man hours and probably billions of dollars in compliance costs. If it actually was a 30% flat tax, it would be a reasonable law with the rate set too high.

Bottom line is, you either favor a progressive system of taxation or you don't. Right now we use what is effectively a flat tax system, but we pretend it's progressive.

Only the mildest from of progressive (regressive) taxation is acceptable. Parts of the current tax structure are flat taxes, parts are not. The complexity of the system is one of its greatest flaws.

So you don't have a problem with a guy making 25k a year paying 5k in federal taxes, while a guy making 100k a year pays 20k?

That 5k means everything to the guy making 25k a year. He can't afford a damn thing in his life. You either think that's a situation that should be addressed, or you don't.

No, I don't. The $500k guy makes five times as much, pays five times as much. That's fair. If, every time anyone in this country earns a fiver, he gives one dollar to the government, that's fair. Naturally, the people who earn more will pay more. You can't say, "but that other guy really, really needs it." I really need that $20k. It's not exactly chickenfeed to me, or to you. However, I am willing to largely relieve him of the burden of paying taxes, so long as he follows exactly the same rules as me.

One other thing -- GOP loves to talk about distributing the "burden" of taxes. How about the distribution of "pain" in an economy like this one? Do you think the pain of a shit economy should be evenly distributed too?

Despite much wailing, the economy even in the recent recession was not bad by historical standards. And it is not right to hit someone in the head just because the guy next to him has a headache.

I have never argued that everyone should pay the same amount of taxes, merely that the rules should be uniform and simple. In a just society, the same rules apply to everyone. This includes taxation. If someone making $50k pays 20%, and someone making $1m pays 20%, that's fair. Seeing as all the SS revenue goes into the general fund anyway, it should be eliminated. Sales taxes should never be deployed on a Federal level, as they are a little too regressive even for me.

One Federal tax for individuals. Flat rate, 20% or less, with deductions for yourself, spouse, children, mortgage interest and any money put into savings like 401k. Same rules for everyone, but the deductions would benefit the lower income earners proportionally more. Fair, but would not penalize marriage or homeownership, or investment. And when you factor in the deductions I mentioned, the lowest income earners would pay a lower effective percentage.

If I was only paying $20k in taxes, it would be an extra $20k in my pocket. I could do a lot with that. You'd want to structure the deductions to more or less zero out the taxes of those making less than about 25k. Though no one should pay no taxes, there should be a limit - even as low as a couple hundred dollars - but everyone should pay. But, for the guy making $500k, those same deductions would effect his tax burden much less proportionally. He'd actually be paying close to the 20%.

And in any event, fairness, to me, is largely based on being under the same rules. In a game of basketball, fairly refereed, I would get my ass kicked by Michael Jordan. That doesn't mean I'm being discriminated against, screwed by the system, or otherwise abused. And, to bring in another point I raised in the comments to another post, the tax withholding system has got to go. The tax-withholding scheme is the only thing that keeps us from a revolution. It was implemented in WWII as a means for getting money into the war machine more efficiently. But its primary effect has been to confuse the public on the nature of the effect of taxation. Instead of writing a check to the government for taxes every year or even every quarter, many people get the delicious feeling of receiving a big check from the treasury, like the Treasury is the fairy godmother or something.

Even though I know how terribly much I give to the gubmint, on an emotional level I'm still thinking, "Cool, $800!" It is the government giving back some of the money it took -without even paying me interest.

It makes the tax process relatively painless. But it shouldn't be, as a practical matter. Writing a check for 30% of your income on April 15 would wake most people up to the reality of taxation. Even for those on the lower end of the scale, that's likely larger than any check they've ever written before. It's easy to approve of government plans to spend money when it's spending money that you never had any real perception of having, since it was never in your bank account, never earned you interest, etc.

The central fact is that it is wrong to pay half your income in taxes. It is wrong that we have this completely fubared tax system that takes even intelligent non-tax attorneys or CPAs hours of skull sweat and worry to comply with. It is wrong that the IRS can screw with your life, and the burden of proof is on you, not the government. You have to prove your innocence! And because the tax code is some complex, it is easy for self serving lobbyists and politicians to fiddle with it for their own purposes. Sick, sick, sick, all of it.

We cannot legislate equality, and it is foolish to attempt it. Especially with the tax code. The most we can hope for is to create a fair system, where everyone has to obey the same rules, and let them have at it. Some, due to hard-won skills or God given talents, will do well, and make millions. Others, due to lack of foresight, deficit of ambition, or lower than average intelligence will do less well. Some people will manage to do both. So let it be. Take a buck out of every five they make, whether they're going up the scale or down.

The Bush economic juggernaut continues to roll right over everyone not directly connected to the GOP gravy train. See this WashPost article for reference.

So what happened last month? All the GDP growth produced...1000 jobs in December. Meanwhile, another 300,000 people stopped looking for work. So while the unemployment rate has "fallen", the far more important employment to population ratio is getting worse and worse.

We'll have to see what happens over the next few months.

Weak holiday hiring by retailers was to blame for holding back job gains. Analysts were surprised by the anemic job growth because they expecting companies to add 100,000 to 150,000 jobs to their payrolls last month. But the net gain was just 1,000 jobs -- which is "quite shocking," Cheney said. "I would certainly have not expected anything resembling that."

Cheney's shocked, huh? What the heck? Maybe the economy isn't quite as simple as tax cut in, standard of living up. Unless you're in that tip-top 1% or so, in which case you can't figure out which BMW or Mercedes you're going to spend your extra cash on (and it will take a lot of extra cash, 'cause the dollar has dropped by 25% versus the Euro).

There's a decided muting to the crowing of GOP cheerleaders...they're all happy about the GDP growth...but where are the jobs?

Oh yeah. They're overseas. And income mobility? Disappearing faster than Powell's "hard evidence" of WMD in Iraq. Raise taxes on the poor, decrease them on the wealthy...what's the effect of that? You prevent regular folks from ever saving up enough money to start their own businesses, and you lock into place the class hierarchy that's becoming increasingly evident in this society.

If you're in Bush's GOP elite, that's precisely what you want. And you're getting it, in spades.

In the tradition of our foreparents, it is time to make resolutions that I will break or ignore by the end of the month. So, here are my 2004 resolutions:

• Try that new South Park Anorexia diet the kids are talking about, and lose about fifty pounds.
• Conquer France
• Purchase several handguns, and send lots of pictures of them to Ross.
• Convince Mrs. Buckethead that we need - solely for Sir John the-in-great-danger-of-falling-behind- his-peers-in-video-game-kickassitude's sake - really, really need to buy a game console.
• Remember all the embarrassing stories I can so Drew's wedding reception will be extra, extra fun when I give the toast. Problem here, though, is that I was just as drunk as he was, and my memory is a little hazy.
• Purchase a large, American made SUV. Something like a suburban. Send time-stamped pictures of me filling up the tank several times a day to Ross.
• Complete, and hopefully publish, a book.
• Not mess up my son's head too much. Have to save some for his teen years.
• Build the Me- 262 model that's been sitting on my bookshelf unassembled since 1997. *
• Produce more offspring.
• Learn to crochet. Not.
• Spend at least one more hour this year learning to play the base.

Of all these resolutions, I think I might have a chance with the last one.

* repeat

Has anyone else noticed that only American Mars landers actually survive to transmit pictures back to Earth? The Russians landed the first probe on Mars back in '71, but it stopped transmitting 20 seconds after it landed. That one must have caught the Martians by surprise. They were more on the ball with other non-American probes.

Of course, even we can go too far - when we planned a landing near their south polar home, that lander had to go. Nevertheless, the success of our other probes is a clear indication that the Martians approve of our American way of life.

... is a robotic dog that carries your ammo. At least according to this Wired Magazine report. 

If your conventional, kibble powered fido is no longer adequate to your needs, rest easy; the new model is gas powered, and can carry 50 lbs of gear for a grateful foot slogger. Naturally, much work remains ahead before our soldiers enter battle accompanied by their faithful robotic rovers, spots and fidos. These initial contracts are essentially fishing expeditions for companies hoping for truly large amounts of government butter. Developing walking, let alone running robots has proved fearsomely difficult, so far - but no one doubts that with enough effort, and enough cash, it can eventually be done.

Mindful of the difficulties of creating walking, running and gamboling robots, the Navy is focusing on the development of mine detecting mechanical lobsters, and disembodied elephant trunk repair robots. The Air Force will eventually live up to its nickname, the chair force, when it succeeds in perfecting combat-capable UAVs, probably within a few decades. We already know how to build jet fighters that can perform maneuvers that would kill their pilots, it's simply a matter of developing the software to make them autonomous.

We shouldn't be surprised by these developments. After all, we have been using robots in combat for decades - what is a cruise missile but a simple, autonomous, jet powered bomb delivery robot, and the new reconaissance drones are already at least partially autonomous. So far, though, most military robots have been large scale, and under the control of rear echelon personnel. The eventual advent of robo-lassie ["Robo-lassie! Lance Corporal timmie is hurt! Go find help!] is just another example of the trend in the US military for putting ever more capabilities in the hands of the common soldier.

These are great days.

The Terminator's Bond is bullshit. It's one of the most hypocritical things I've ever heard of. On one hand, he's saying low taxes are good and the big government is bad, and on other hand he's saying, fuck it! Let's just pass the problem to the future!

Deal with it now, asshole. Oh, the problem is harder than you thought? There are huge structural problems in California. More deficit financing isn't the answer. Either make the hard choices to cut services, or raise taxes. I don't give a crap about which way you go.

Or if she can, she chooses to do it only with special, made-up numbers! See Jane obfuscate.

50 comments on that article and not ONE person has bothered to go to the IRS web site and look up the actual data? OK, maybe some of them have. Links follow.

It occurs to me that perhaps Jane ought to have done at least that before invoking the all-magic, all-powerful "he's lying" spell, usable by all sides in all political battles.

I've found reasonably complete information, in the form of spreadsheets, for the tax year 2000. It's probably fairly representative, although subject to some change.

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=96586,00.html

This link will give you an EXE file that decompresses into a series of spreadsheets. These contain plenty of data on income, distributed into fairly narrow bands.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/00inalcr.exe

10 minutes with Excel, and I've found the following:

The average TAXPAYER (not family) with an income under $50,000 pays an average of $2187 in federal taxes. This represents around 13.5% of his income. Since a family of four will have a lot more deductions, the $1600 tax figure seems pretty reasonable to me. According to the IRS spreadsheets, people with incomes below $50,000 pay an average of 13.5% of their income in federal income tax.

Of course, our taxpayer is ALSO paying around 15.8% (his half and employer's half) of his income for the social security boondoggle (which is actually just a flat tax system on the poor, since the money just goes in the general fund anyway). If we adjust the 15.8% for the employer portion (by adding that to total income), it becomes 14.6%.

Add the two of them together, and our guy is paying:

14.6% + 13.5% = 28.1%

Fascinating so far, huh? Our folks under 50k are all paying around 28% of their incomes to the federal government. I'd be pissed off if I was one of them.

So that means are the wealthiest 0.1% of our population are paying more, right? Let's take a look:

In 2000 there were around 240,000 returns filed with incomes in excess of $1,000,000. The average taxpayer in this bracket paid $945,191. Wow. Taxes paid by folks in these bands averaged 30.1% of income. That is ever-so-slightly higher than that paid by our 50k guy. Note that social security payments, as a percentage of income for these taxpayers, are almost non-existent. We can fairly safely factor them out.

If anybody out there wants a flat tax system, I've got news for you: We already have one. People making multi-million dollar incomes pay the same percentage as very hard-working, low-paid folks. And don't cry "investment income" or any such bullshit. All that kind of income has ALREADY been factored out of all of these calculations...taxable vs. non-taxable income.

The bottom line: Clark's numbers are right. He gives the reduction on taxes on those below 50k as around $33 Billion. A 5% tax increase on those over $1,000,000 in income (NOT including that first million), by my numbers, comes to around $35 Billion or so. Seems in balance to me, as of 2000 numbers.

Break out your spreadsheet, and crunch the numbers yourself. You want to leave everything to frickin' pundits and goddamn politicians? Or even worse...bloggers? Like me?

My socialist Canadian education taught me how to use a spreadsheet.

And one other point: If real rich folks use tactics to move more of their income out of the taxable income category, us poor folks win anyway...because to do that, they'll have to invest the money, or put it into non-taxable bonds, or some such thing. These activities benefit the public...