Inequality/tax progressiveness

This harkens back to the schem of tax progressiveness I was talking about over on thecitizens oh so long ago.

clipped from economistsview.typepad.com Fair Taxes? Depends What You Mean by ‘Fair', by Greg Mankiw, Economic View, NY Times: The C.B.O.’s most recent calculations of federal tax rates show a highly progressive system. ... The poorest fifth of the population, with average annual income of $15,400, pays only 4.5 percent of its income in federal taxes. The middle fifth, with income of $56,200, pays 13.9 percent. And the top fifth, with income of $207,200, pays 25.1 percent. The best source for objective data on the distribution of the tax burden is the Congressional Budget Office. The C.B.O. goes beyond anecdotes and bald assertions to provide hard data on who pays taxes. ... At the very top of the income distribution, the C.B.O. reports even higher tax rates. The richest 1 percent has average income of $1,259,700 and forks over 31.1 percent of its income to the federal government. The fancy economics term for this is distributional equity. Here's an editorial I wrote awhile back on the same topic:

another econ graph

Title kinda contains the point.

clipped from economistsview.typepad.com Social Spending and GDP per Capita

Follow up to previous

mmm...linear fit...

clipped from economistsview.typepad.com

WSJ, how could you?

Embarrassing as this is, I think it might be cute to show my College Algebra students as an example of how not to fit a graph to data.

clipped from online.wsj.com

So, ScribeFire seems to be putting truckloads of whitespace in my blogger posts. Purportedly this is because ScribeFire's not handling the new Google-owned blogger that well. This seems like a big part of the userbase.

At least the "& nbsp;" stuff didn't show up explicitly this time (I'm posting from ScribeFire for Firefox for Windows, and I posted as a draft first; when I posted from ScribeFire for Firefox for Linux, posting direct, I got explicit nbsp's all over the place. (I like two spaces after my periods, which apparently inserts an nbsp.)

Atrios makes a fine observation here:

After 9/11, the justifiability of our actions quickly got confused with the wisdom of them.

No doubt a wartime mentality enhances this whole notion, but regardless, this is one of those notions that people are on one side or the other of, and don't even know they are (or that someone could possibly be on the other side).

I got into a small fracas over at The Citizens with RbR over the Danish newspaper Mohammed cartoons thing, and this is what it boiled down to: he thought that because I thought the publishers were contentious, baiting, and mean, that I wanted to dismantle freedom of speech and the press. He was thinking that because they were _allowed_ to do something, questioning the _wisdom_ of it was tantamount to squelching their right.

I'm happy to defend to the death your right to say whatever idiotic thing you want. I also feel justified in telling you how idiotic it is, as well as how idiotic you're being for saying it.

Technorati Tags: politics, discourse

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Guided Tour of Diigo

I reckon this blog has a readership of 1, at least right now, so I don't mind using it as a guinea pig:

Guided Tour of Diigo

You should check it out. I'm using the "BlogThis" extension to Firefox, but Diigo is pretty neato too.

Hey, I don't suppose there's a super-easy way to cross-post to several blogs in blogger? (This betrays my deep ignorance, I know.)

I'm now thinking that I'd like to have one central blog, which I actually _would_ post to regularly, and depending on what category the thought of the day fell in, I'd like it to get posted to dedicated blogs (Gnomicon, Trollkien, Curmudgeon Gamer, etc.) also. That way _I_ only post one place, which comprises my whole "online presence", and blogs that cover a particular topic suck up the appropriate pieces for their own use.

I don't really expect anyone to see this in the near future, since this blog has been so moribund, but if I do some searching and answer my own question, I'll put the answer here.