Republicans - All Wrong, all the Time, Pt 18: Tax Cuts/ Increases and the Deficit

Repugnicants aren't just liars - they are buffoons.

So, by the way, is anyone who would vote for them.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

So, How Bad Is It?

Krugman provides the answers, with graphs.

It's bad.  Really, really bad.

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Haiku Wednesday - Horizons

Horizons

Field of view margins:

Barriers, invitations?

You must make the choice.

Paul Krugman Hits Me Upside The Head With A 2 By 4

 Through the medium of the printed word, Paul Krugman reaches across space and time to smack some sense into me.

Here and again here I talk about income mobility, and how it is misleading relative to personal and generational wealth.  It's actually far worse than I thought.

The data from The Tax Foundation, cited in the second link above, is based on the income mobility of tax payers.   Let that sink in for a minute, because the very same Tax Foundation - pushing quite a different agenda this time - tells us that in 2006, an estimated 41% of the population payed no income tax, including 15 million households or individuals who didn't even need to file a return.  

So - they are basing their conclusions about income mobility on a data set that specifically excludes a large sub-set of the population.  And who are these people?  Let's ask the Tax Foundation.

Why do many single filers face zero tax liability? One reason is that single filers tend to be younger and earn lower incomes than married filers—especially single parents who file as head-of-household. As a result, married taxpayers pay roughly 75 percent of all federal income taxes, despite filing only 40 percent of returns.

Oh, I see - low income head-of-household folks.   It takes no great stretch of the imagination to realize that these are the people most deeply  mired in poverty, and the least likely to ever find their way out of it.

So - basing a study of income mobility on tax payer data introduces an enormous bias.  This methodology is inherently flawed, and leads to a wildly erroneous conclusion about economic disparity.

I will not consider for even a microsecond the possibility that The Tax Foundation did this in honest ignorance. They are a group with an agenda, and to support that agenda they present this misleading study.  This also illustrates how propagandists can mislead without actually telling lies.  They just cherry-pick or select an inherently biased data set, and draw conclusions as if they had considered the entire population.

Wow.  This is disgusting!

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with Krugman.  I wouldn't have thought about any of this, except I'm reading his 1999  book, The Accidental Theorist, a collection of essays originally published in various locations.  In a chapter called An Uneven Exchange, in a section called Right-Wing Wrongs, Krugman tells about something from right-wing asshat lair Dick Armey's 1995 book, The Freedom Revolution.

Armey used a data set over a different time period, but exactly the same methodology to promote the canard that Reagan's economic policies were successful, and the middle class is alive and well.  We'll let Krugman take over (emphasis his.)

Again, he doesn't cite the source, but these are familiar numbers. They come from a botched 1992 Bush administration study, a study that was immediately ridiculed and that its authors would just as soon forget,


This is why: The study tracked the number of people who had paid income taxes in each of the years from 1979 to 1988.  Since only about half the working population actually paid taxes over the entire period, this meant that the study was already biased toward tracking the relatively successful.  And then these earners were then compared to the population at large.

There are two sources of error here: the part of the population paying taxes in a given year, and the even lower part paying taxes over every year of the referenced time period.  These are not mistakes.  With Armey and The Tax Foundation they are deliberate misrepresentations, told to make you believe that the American economy is vibrant and dynamic, the middle class is healthy, and rags-to-riches stories are common in America.  The Tax Foundation study is inexcusable.  Their methodology was proven to be flawed, misleading, and agenda-driven years before they did their study.  They had to know this.

The truth is, the rich are grabbing it all, and you and I are losing ground, every second of every day.

Meanwhile, the regressive liars keep on lying.
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Deep Stupid #18 - Feed Grandma to the Rich

I don't do DEEP STUPID posts very often - not because there is a lack of stupidity out there, but because doing it right is a hell of a lot of work, and I'm rather lazy.

At HuffPo, Neel Kashkari gets the DEEP STUPID treatment, and all I have to do is supply the link!  (Back up, you just passed it.)

Do click through and read what this sniveling asshat has to say. 

There's even a graph!

H/T to the lovely wife.

Not Your Father's Republican Party

Though it might be your great grandfather's.

I've been seriously disturbed by the degeneration of the former Republican, now Repugnicant party into an intellectually and ethically bankrupt cadre of bitter, lying partisan asshats.  There is no point in even trying to be polite when talking about them.  They have one goal: the restoration of an economically and politically elitist oligarchy, as was the case in the first part of the 20th century.  To the detriment of us all, they have largely succeeded.

I commented on this sad turn of events here, here, here, and here.  (Be among the very first to ever set eyes on my early blogs. And if you are going to comment, please do it at this post.) 

Since then, things have only gotten worse.  It's impossible for anyone with the slightest shred of objectivity to avoid the realization that the Repugnicants have nothing to offer, except negativity, intellectual nihilism and a big lie.

Please click through and read these last two links.  They present vitally important insights.
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Not Your Father's Democracy

Over at Plain Politics, (which see, for context) Johnathon opined:

More generally, it's just real hard sometimes for those of us who pay a lot of attention to politics to get around the idea of how little attention most others pay, including the broad category of those who vote most of the time . . .

He is referring, of course, to the infamous "LOW INFORMATION VOTER," aka, the overwhelming majority of the American electorate.


In comments, I offered this (edited for political relevance) opinion:

1) Democracy assumes an intelligent and informed electorate. Without it, we get what you are describing. Which is why democracy is failing in this country. Maybe that is why, historically, democracies have a finite life time.
 
2) Life is hard. After a day of slinging whatever from 9 to 5, parent teacher confs. and all the other stuff of life, the universe, and everything, who wants to think about something as arcane and intrinsically difficult as politics? Especially when the BIG GAME is on. Ergo, no. 1.

3) With international corporations so much in control of both parties, it's pretty easy to think "There's not a dime's worth of difference." This makes apathy a pretty inviting option. Ergo, no.1.
 
4) There is so much deliberate misinformation: Obama is an Arab Nazi socialist, Bush tax cuts didn't increase the deficits because they lead to a (god help us) "vibrant" economy; that finding real information and sorting wheat from chaff takes considerable effort. Ergo, no.1.

Aren't we kinda screwed?
JzB

A Real Number of Posts on the UNIT

In my quest to discover why 1 is not a prime, I have found out that since the time of Euclid, 1 has not even been a number!?!

I am giving up. Not so much conceding defeat as loosing by default while I slouch away from this mad-hatter numerology, muttering and shaking my head. You see, the prime reason "One" can't be a prime number is that it isn't even a number to begin with.

This is more than my little pea brain (and I only have the 1, you see, so my number of brains is . . . well, not 0, since 1 is not zero, but it has to be zero because 1 is not a number - can you see where this is taking me?) can handle.

This is probably why I became a lowly chemist, whose approach to numbers (and/or units) is strictly utilitarian.

I am going to make me a unit of honking big martini, with a legitimate prime, odd and Fibonacci number of jumbo olives. (Three, if you must know.)

Cheers!
JzB who is one perplexed unit (if that's not redundant)

Quote of The Day

I love it when Brad Delong agrees with me.  I have been thinking something very much along the lines of his first paragraph, but never got to the point of articulating it - and besides, who the hell am I to say such a thing?

One of the embarrassing dirty little secrets of economics is that there is no such thing as economic theory properly so-called. There is simply no set of foundational bedrock principles on which one can base calculations that illuminate situations in the real world. Biologists know that every cell runs off instructions for protein synthesis encoded in its DNA. Chemists start with what the Heisenberg and Pauli principles plus the three-dimensionality of space tell us about stable electron configurations. Physicists start with the four fundamental forces of nature. Economists have none of that. The "economic principles" underpinning their theories are a fraud--not bedrock truths but mere knobs twiddled and tunes so that th right conclusions come out of the analysis.

What are the "right" conclusions? It depends on what type of economist you are, for three are two types. One type chooses, for non-economic and non-scientific reasons, a political stance and a political set of allies, and twiddles and tunes their assumptions until they come out with conclusions that please their allies and their stance. The other type takes the carcass of history, throws it into the pot, turns up the heat, and boils it down, hoping that the bones and the skeleton that emerge will teach lessons and suggest principles that will be useful to voters, bureaucrats, and politicians as they try to guide our civilization as it slouches toward utopia. (You will not be surprised to learn that I think that only this second kind of economist has any use at all.)

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Six Word Saturday 7/24

Concerts rained out two straight weeks.

Lots of rain in the long range forecast, too.  And the humidity is oppressive.  Yuck!

What the Hell? Friday -- On the Primacy of the Number 1

Or not.

In another part of the universe, I was corrected by a math teacher for calling the number "one" a prime.

After a bit of research, I retorted thusly:

I read the info on 1 not a prime and am deeply underwhelmed. Unless I'm missing something big, the reason that 1 is not a prime is that mathematicians have conspired, in a completely arbitrary and discriminatory fashion, to deprive 1 of primehood, by including in the prime definition "greater than 1." If you take a prime to be a number divisible only by 1 and itself, 1 clearly qualifies. Granted it's the degenerate case (chemists will understand what this means) but that really makes no difference.

Tongue in cheek - sure.  But I'm not above a bit of japing.  Anyway, I was advised to have a look at this link.  Which I did.  Here is my new and improved response, re: the four reasons found there (which see.)

Answer 1: 
My point exactly: by definition, with no serious reasoning.  It's a totally unconvincing word game, and totally lame.

Answer 2:
Re: the fundamental theorem - the word "uniquely" is the kicker here.  But that is still just word play.  Tacking on any number of "x1" factors is clearly redundant, and could be eliminated by a more elaborate and linguistically clumsy definition - which I will not attempt at the moment.  BTW, this also illustrates what I meant by a degenerate case.  All the infinite number of potential "x1"s collapse into a single "x1."

Actually, I'll go further and say that the fact that you can write the product non-uniquely is irrelevant to the fact that you can still write it with a single "x1" in the formula, and that THAT is a unique answer.

So we still do not have a really sound reason.

On the other hand, though, lets take another look at the fundamental theorem, "Every positive integer greater than one can be written uniquely as a product of primes."  Ignoring the problematic "uniquely" for the nonce, clearly, if 1 is excluded from the primes, then this theorem crashes and burns.  What are the factors of any prime, say, 5?  They are 5 and . . . and 1!  How can this simple fact not put a Q.E.D. on the primacy of 1?

Answer 3:
By the logic expressed there, I cannot be both a trombonist and a grandfather, though each is a subset of the set  "real humans"  -  being a grandfather is sooo much more important.  Really?  A thing cannot belong to two sets at once?  Five is both a prime and a Fibonacci number.  This reasoning is embarrassingly fatuous.

Answer 4:
This seems to be just an elaborated restatement of definition 3.

Now it's possible that I'm missing something, but here is my verdict.

Reasons for excluding 1 from the primes boil down to, "It's not because I say it's not."   I think that claim has no merit, and can be summarily rejected.

Reason for including 1 in the primes is that without it, the fundamental theorem turns out to be false.   This is not really a big deal for me, but mathematicians will probably find it disconcerting. 

Ergo, 1 is a prime.

Q.E.D.

Where did I go astray?  Help me out, somebody.

Presumably, A Happy Ending -- Sort Of

It's all over the news, but I saw it at P6 first, so I'll give him the hat tip.

The White House has apolgized, Visack has apologized.   Well, good for them.  Sherrod has been offer a new job at the Ag Dept.

But the basic cancer of lying right wing character assassination as a variant of gotcha-ism remains unaddressed.

Breitbart remains a hero on the right.  David Frum reports on the reactions of the right.   Click through his links to find lots of well-deserved condemnation of the Obama administration for their callous treatment of this innocent woman.  As for Breitbart . . .  pretty much crickets.

When Dan Rather succumbed to the forged Bush war record hoax in 2004, CBS forced him into retirement. Breitbart is the conservative Dan Rather, but there will be no discredit, no resignation for him.
 
Instead, conservatives are consumed with a new snippets-out-of-context uproar, the latest round of JournoList quotations. Here at last is proof of the cynical machinations of the hated liberal media! As to the cynical machinations of conservative media — well, as the saying goes, the fish never notices the water through which it swims.

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