perfidy

Daniel Gross covers ground that, I seem to recall, we've covered here before.

Old folks is gettin' older. Payroll taxes is risin'. Income taxes is goin' down.

Why, pray tell, did we give the richest 1% of this country a massive tax cut? Why, they were going to invest it, right?

But we gave them an income tax reduction. Not an investment tax reduction. If they invest the money, long term, they were already getting a different, lower tax rate.

So why did we give a tax break on income that doesn't go to investment?

Beats me.

Via geekpress we answer the timeless question, "In a fight, who would win, a medieval knight, or a samurai?"

Still no answer on whether Daisy Duke could beat a Charlie's Angel at foxy boxing, though. To the library!

"[Fo]r me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds."

--Wallace "Inconceivable" Shawn, in the New York Times.

"Very well... Security for some, and tiny American flags for others! [wild cheering]"

The Weekly Standard (!) (?) (!!) (???) (....!) (.) is running a cover story making the case for creating a federal terrorism court so that cases like Gitmo and Jose "dirrrty" Padilla can be dealt with in a clear, standard, and lawful manner. Whoda thunk the Standard would come around?

If you can stand a certain amount of horseshit (see the following excerpt... "bullying" my arse), do read it. Support for a very good idea, from an unexpected quarter.

Morally intimidated and bullied by civil libertarian ideologues, partisan opportunists, and a press almost universally hostile on these issues--yet having accepted, along with the rest of the country, the lessons of Korematsu, the Red Scare, and the due process revolution of the 1960s--administration officials seem, not surprisingly, to prefer to evade the debate or retreat behind the rhetoric of "security." The administration has failed to make its case well or to take modest actions that could strengthen its case. This in turn encourages the critics and deepens the government's reluctance to touch a set of issues on which it feels it can only lose.

The time has come for the government to break this poisonous cycle. Balancing liberty and security in a way that is plain and understandable to all is a tough job, but it must be attempted. The centerpiece of a Bush administration civil liberties offensive should be creative institutional reform. A new terrorism court is the place to start.

[wik] I had to pull out this observation too, which lends a particular urgency to the Standards' call: "The enemy combatant designation, while it fills a legitimate need in the current context, exists in a legal limbo where no court, civil or military, has clear jurisdiction, and thus opens the door to valid concern about due process." Damn straight.

Despite my lengthy absence from these august pages, I have not forgotten the challenge I laid at my own feet. My task was to examine the various problems we face (or don't, as the case may be) with the environment, and to outline a course of action to deal with them.

I was able to do some reading on the matter last month, and the problems boil down to several claims from the environmentalists:

• Pollution
• Resource Depletion
• Loss of Biodiversity/Species Extinction
• Overpopulation/Famine
• Global Warming

Here, I will deal with two of them, and the rest will follow shortly.

Resource Depletion and Overpopulation/Famine have declined in importance, even amongst environmentalists over the last couple decades in large part because they have proven to be untrue. Back in the early seventies the Club of Rome and people like Paul Ehrlich famously predicted famine, running out of natural resources and generally the end of the world. They predicted that it would have happened by now. That this has not come to pass (though I forgot to check Drudge this morning, it might have happened. Nope, I checked and the world hasn't ended) should have chastened them. But Ehrlich among others is still selling his heady brand of doom.

The most recent demographics indicate that the world population will peak somewhere around mid century at about 8 billion people, and thereafter begin to decline. The low end UN projection in fact predicts a peak at less than 8 billion before 2040, and then decline. Since this is only about a 25% percent increase, it seems unlikely that this will cause great chaos in the coming decades. Even without GM foods, recent advances in agriculture (at least in the wealthier nations, though slowly spreading) seem adequate to handle this increase.

Given that there is likely going to be enough food, and that in the last couple centuries most if not all famines have had political causes (Ukraine, China, Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia) rather than purely environmental ones, I think it is safe to say that this is really not an issue we need to worry about, at least on the big scale.

For the other, resource depletion, we face a similar non-crisis. Most of the projections that led to the Club of Rome and others to declare that we would run out of x resource in y years were based on known reserves of x and current consumption rates. The fundamental problem with these projections is that they are based on known reserves, or worse on proven reserves. This is akin to being hungry and in a large warehouse with a flashlight. You shine the beam around, and see food. You feverishly calculate that you will run out of the food you see in front of you in three days. Certain starvation! Of course, as you eat the food in front of you, you can shine the flashlight around to look for more food. Of course, you might have to walk further to get it, or climb up the shelves, but it is there.

So it goes with minerals and petroleum and other things we dig out of the ground. Despite increasing consumption, proven reserves of every commodity metal are larger than they were when the Club of Rome first published its predictions. Also, prices for most of these are lower - indicating that they are trending less rather than more scarce. The Earth is a very, very big place, and we inhabit only the surface. There is little likelihood that we will ever "exhaust" the Earth of resources. (And if it ever seemed likely that we were about to, there are always asteroids...)

There are a couple things that we can learn here. One, always take doomsday scenarios with a grain of salt. Don't ignore them, but certainly don't begin screaming that the sky is falling. Two, to the extent that these problems ever were problems, technology was the solution. Better agricultural technology has vastly increased our ability to grow food. The Green revolution was happening at the same time that Ehrlich was prophesying doom. The new revolution in GM foods promises to similarly increase our ability to produce sustenance for the teeming hordes. A side benefit of these new techniques is that the land needed for farming is actually reduced - which means that where the new style farming is adopted, there is less pressure on marginally arable land, which means less desertification or encroachment on rainforests. In the United States, there is more forestland east of the Mississippi than at any time since the early 1800s.

A primary reason that population is expected to begin falling is that generally speaking, the wealthier a nation it is, the less children its citizens will have. Europe and Japan are facing a demographic crisis already as their birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. And large areas of east Asia have apparently crossed the line into lowered fertility rates. Of course, the draconian policies of the Chinese communist government have played a role here as well. If we continue to get wealthier, the population will eventually decline. Though this may cause other problems…

The same is true of mining. New technology means that we can affordably (profitably) get at resources that would have been completely unfeasible twenty years ago. So, reserves are larger. And the new methods are almost universally less damaging to the environment. The oil drilling that was proposed in the Alaskan ANWR reserve would have tapped the oil of a region the size of South Carolina from a facility no larger than Dulles Airport outside Washington. Strip mining is becoming a thing of the past, and in general things are getting better. And it is wealth and technology that is making them so.

So, for these two issues, I hereby declare them to be non-issues, and needing no corrective action of any kind.

In the next few days, I will tackle the other issues. Stay tuned.

Slate is hosting a week-long series called Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War. As a centrist fencesitter whose support for the war changes like Ohio weather, I have to say it's interesting reading.

Well, that's not quite fair to myself. What I ought to say is this: I remain deeply skeptical about the reasons that the Bush administration offered about why Saddam Hussein needed to fall. Whether or not Hussein was thisclose to using lethal force against the US remains very much in doubt and no matter how you parse the words that Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. used on any given day the undeniable impression which accrues is that they wanted us, the Amurrican people, to think that Hussein was, in fact, thisclose.

For me, the humanitarian argument was one of the strongest in favor of getting rid of the rat bastid. A close second was the "unfinished business" scenario. Unfortunately, I also believe that "unfinished business" is no reason to go to war.

My other, more specific objections over timing and preparation are well-covered in this month's Atlantic Monthly cover stories by James Fallows and Kenneth Pollack. I suggest you check them out.

That all being said, it's an interesting thing to watch hawkish liberals play Monday morning quarterback on their own predictions and opinions about Iraq.
Jacob Weisberg starts things off as moderator, offering his own assessment:

To me, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis remains sufficient justification, which is why I don't think the failure to find weapons of mass destruction by itself invalidates the case for war (though it certainly weakens it). What does affect my view is the huge and growing cost of the invasion and occupation: in American lives (we're about to hit 500 dead and several thousand more have been injured); in money (more than $160 billion in borrowed funds); and in terms of lost opportunity (we might have found Osama Bin Laden by now if we'd committed some of those resources to Afghanistan). Most significant are the least tangible costs: increased hatred for the United States, which both fosters future terrorism and undermines the international support we will need to fight terrorism effectively for many years to come. Of course, the fall of Saddam has made us safer and is likely to produce all sorts of positive side effects, such as Qaddafi's capitulation. But the diminution of America's ability to create consensus around actions necessary for collective security makes us less safe. So, while I still think the Iraq war was morally justified, I'm not at all sure it was worth the costs.

Kenneth Pollack offers his (re)assessment thus:

I think the war put to rest the fantasies of the neocons that we could simply arm Ahmad Chalabi and a few thousand followers (followers he still has not actually produced), give them air cover, and send them in to spark a rolling revolution. Richard Perle and others argued for that initially, but in the end they had to support a full-scale invasion as the only realistic course. The covert-action-based regime-change policies that I and others in the U.S. government had pushed for as an alternative never had a high likelihood of success, either—they were just slightly more likely to produce a coup and much less likely to create a catastrophic "Bay of Goats," as Gen. Anthony Zinni once put it. Ironically, I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.

Pollack goes on to mention deterrence as a possible gambit to keep Hussein in check. I find this curious. Hussein had a gift for self-preservation at all costs (the same impulse which makes it very unlikely he was going to do anything on his own to infuriate the USA). But at the same time he has proven a notoriously slippery customer, more like the Saddam Hussein of South Park's imagination (yeah, budday!) than a brittle aging autocrat like that shit Castro.

Just a thought: given the interplay of these two things-- self-preservation and perfidousness-- how would it be possible to know whether deterrence was working?

Anway, moving on. The next commenter, Thomas Friedman, also mentions deterrence but then swings for the fences.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we too are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

I can almost buy this-- almost. I would be more convinced that this analysis is correct if we had invaded Syria or Pakistan-- a real, live, state sponsor of Muslim extremist terrorism.

The way I see the libervasion of Iraq, in a geopolitical sense, is like this (cowboy analogy to follow-- please excuse me): the US walks into the meanest, roughest bar in town, pulls out a sixgun, and shoots the guy closest to the door in the face. Sure, it makes everyone think you're crazy and not to be fucked with, but might there not be better, more efficient ways to make it utterly and unmistakably clear that the USA is unfuckwithable?

That's it folks. The half-bakery is closed. No more donuts today.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy suffered a brief and minor suspension of operations. This blackout, apparently caused by a rogue agent known only as "mySQL" has been isolated, corrected, and restored as an honored, functioning member of the Perfidy support staff.

Our apologies to the thousands of gnomes displaced in the aftermath of the correction of "mySQL." Your families will be duly compensated and the area where your homes stood will be safe for habitation once again within 1.3 million years, give or take.

Special attention must be given to "Kathy Kinsley," the entity entrusted with the care and feeding of the servers on which the Ministry's online presence resides. Within minutes of the problem arising, Ms. Kinsley was working to rectify it. Truly an exceptional entity.

Go about your business.

WSJ responds to some of the Paul O'Neill information...by saying he's just a baby, a big fat ego-driven CEO...unlike the other ego-driven CEO types in the administration.

That was then and this is now. It now turns out Mr. O'Neill has talked nearly daily for the last year with Mr. Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who has now written a new explosive book on President Bush's first term. Mr. O'Neill also turned over to Mr. Suskind a minute-by-minute accounting of his time in office along with CD-ROMs containing 19,000 pages of documents he took with him from Washington.

Mr. O'Neill may have been a team player during his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his tenure as the successful head of Alcoa, the aluminum company, seems to have instilled in him "CEO disease," the inability for someone who runs a large enterprise to adapt and subordinate a large ego to the interests of a group.

Far from being a truth-teller, Mr. O'Neill comes across in Mr. Suskind's book as a vengeful Lone Ranger, someone bitter because his advice was spurned but who stubbornly chose to stay in the job anyway. "He could have resigned quietly on principle," one White House aide told me. "Instead we had to push him out."

Mr. O'Neill may like to see himself as a contemporary Cyrus Vance, who in 1980 left as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State over principled disagreements on foreign policy. But instead he resembles Don Regan, the temperamental White House chief of staff who, after President Reagan fired him, went on to write a tell-all book embarrassing his old boss with revelations about Nancy Reagan's fondness for astrologers. The book made Mr. Regan look small and it didn't do much damage to Mr. Reagan's reputation. The same will be true of Mr. O'Neill's poison-pen recollections.

Not one word in their editorial about whether the circumstances he's describing are actually true or not. Dear WSJ: Is Paul lying? Do you care to address the accusations directly?

No, they don't. And neither will any other conservative commentator. Well, maybe Buckethead.

Time Magazine gives us a short look at Pulitzer winner Ron Suskind's upcoming book on the internals of the Bush adminstration. And it's just in time for the election. Paul O'Neill has worked for several Presidents and spent two years inside this one's office...should be worth a read.

He's got 19,000 pages of stuff he brought with him; a minute by minute account of what he did while he was there. I wonder how Bush and friends are going to bury this one...

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...

Here's a sickening followup on my post of yesterday about the enforcement of a no-free-speech-zones by the Secret Service.

A federal court has found a man guilty of speaking his mind in the presence of the President.

From the story: "U.S. Magistrate Bristow Marchant acknowledged Bursey was not a threat to Bush during the president’s Oct. 24, 2002, visit to Columbia. But the judge dismissed Bursey’s free speech defense and ruled the protester had no right to be as close to Bush as Bursey wanted in his efforts to show that some South Carolinians opposed his plan to attack Iraq."

Also from the story: "Bursey and other protesters testified he was not contentious. They said they were ordered to a "free speech zone" that did not exist and that police kept sending them farther from Bush. Secret Service agents testified there was no marked protection zone but said police patrolled the area and enforced a clear restricted area. Local police chose the demonstration area."

What? I don't get it. Apparently the celebrated "Chewbacca Defense" has been succeeded by the "Calvinball Defense."

-"So where do we protesters stand-- over here?"
-"You'll have to move."
-"Um, ok. Where to?"
-"Where we tell you to."
-"Great. Now where's that. Here?"
-"No, over there. Back up."
-"Here?"
-"No... keep going!"
-"But you said..."
-"Keep going!"
-"Here?"
-"Keep backing up..."
-"Here?"
-"That's it, asshole! You're under arrest! Swarm! Swarm! Swarm!"

A bold stroke by Clark. A lot of people are going to realize that under this plan, they won't be paying any federal taxes. Damn. Shows you just how much the top end in this country makes...

Don't believe me? Check out this picture.

Why are we doing this again?

Oh yeah -- because the universe contains many things we do not know, and we might as well learn a few of them while we're still here.

Seriously cool stuff.

Let's compare and contrast, class! It'll be our brain exercise for the day.

Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") has an op-ed piece in the New York Times last weekend about Ann Veneman, spokeswoman for the Secretary of Agriculture. Prior to this gig, Veneman was PR director for the beef lobby. Her message to America, about the threat of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy? "Remain calm, all is well!"

Meanwhile, the USDA is sending 450 calves to slaughter because they have no way of tracking which one is the offspring of the cow diagnosed with BSE. Also, a batch of beef bones sold mostly in San Jose California is being recalled. "Mmmmm, mom! This sancocho is really good! What's the secret ingredient?" "It's prions, mi hijo!"

According to Ms. Veneman, does the USDA need a better tracking system for cow lineages, and tighter observation of existing nerve-matter feed restrictions? Of course not, silly! All is well!

(also posted to blogcritics)

Norbizness has written a nice little screed about the "Free Speech Zones" the Secret Service enforces around the President. You know, the fenced-in lot a half mile away, and if you leave it carrying a sign that says "Bush NO!" you get arrested and hauled off for endangering the president with your pointy sharp words.

On the other side of the coin, Eugene Volokh has written a sensible and thought-provoking piece for (of all people) the scenery-chewers at the National Review Online, arguing that it's really not 'the liberals' who are enemies of free speech, at least from a judicial standpoint.

Den Beste is a good writer, and I certainly wouldn't want to get into any kind of intellectual pissing match with him; I wouldn't last long.

But.

"For thirty years we've been told that patriotism was shameful. " " For thirty years we've been pelted with the message that there was nothing about America that justified any pride."

What the hell is he talking about? "Pelted" with this message? By who? Most of the time? Some of the time?

Be honest. Exactly how much of the time are you pelted with the message that there is "nothing about America that justifies pride". The answer is, of course, hardly ever. The reason? The world's gray, and so is America. There are some very great things about this country and some not very great things.

In Den Beste's America, you're either with him, or you're against him. That is exactly what America is not about.

Several hundred words of bitching about poor, trod-upon "Patriotism", and he doesn't bother to define the term. That seems like something of an omission, until you realize that is isn't an omission. Everybody's definition of patriotism is going to be different. Den Beste's might be "unquestioning adoration for anyone who kicks random ass in response to terrorism". Mine might be "liberty and truth for all". Who knows? But it is almost certain that we disagree.

Den Beste further obscurs by failing to point out that virtually all criticism of America comes from overseas. His "real Americans" are in a sea of, well, people who don't agree with them! Dammit!

The constitution is a fuzzy document, deliberately, so that multiple viewpoints can find a home in this country. We reign in the extremes, and trust that the majority will be reasonably correct.

The poll question I'd like to see answered: Given what we now know about Saddam Hussein's WMD (there aren't any), would you have supported the invasion?

This NY Times article on Captain James Yee's case is rather sobering. Yee, as a few citizens in America may remember, was charged by the military with aiding the enemy, treason, or some such nonsense.

The result of all that is that there has been no evidence whatsoever supporting the charges. They are a complete fabrication. Good, you may say to yourself...the system worked.

Except that this guy spent 76 days, a fair number of them in leg chains, while the assholes who put him there did everything they possibly could to justify their having done so. They've destroyed his life, his family, and everything they could get their hands on.

The military's reaction to this? Pretty much nothing. Would somebody please explain to me how two officers, being charged with exactly the same crime, can be treated so differently? One is given immunity from prosecution, and tells her story. The other is thrown in jail for two and a half months. There must be some kind of legal principle that prevents this. Of course, that may not apply in military courts.

I am just stunned by the whole thing. At what point does a prosecutor figure that it's time to back off?

The double standard is appalling.

I wonder if Donanld Sensing, the team players at LGF, Winds of Change might care to refine their assessment of the case, and perhaps state their views on prosecutor infallibility.

Want to see a very scary graph? Check this graph. If you're not employed and you're in the population, you're being supported in one way or another...this is the real drag on the economy. I'd sure like to know how many of these people are employable and are not working...

Welly, welly, welly! Here's one from the obvious files, kids! Pete Rose bet on baseball. Yup, he said it.

In other news, OJ is thisclose to finding the real killers.

All kidding aside, it sucks that it took Pete this long to just fess up. Everybody in the world knows he did it and not very many folks care (this assertion being the result of an informal poll I just conducted on myself). Hopefully now that he's earned his lesson they'll let him back into baseball with all those other paragons of restraint and Christian virtue like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Darryl Strawberry, Gaylord Perry, Doc Ellis, and David Wells.

It's a pity. Baseball makes heroes and legends of its players, but off the field baseball players usually end up coming off as petty, small people. Rose could have been spending the last fifteen years managing the Reds and burnishing his legend as "Charlie Hustle, king of the baserunners." Instead, we all remember him as a bullheaded player who ran out every single and very stupidly put Ray Fosse in the hospital during an All-Star Game.

Let's get him in the Hall of Fame quick, before he makes matters any worse for himself.

[wik] Eric Olsen, Godfather of Blogcritics and my lord and master, offers this assessment of Pete Rose, man and player:

I always prefer extraordinary talent over the "overachieving slob who doesn't have the talent but achieves on guts" crap, and especially if that overachiever is a swaggering, egomaniacal shit ranch. That turd had/has zero style and he hit like a girl - that's what his HOF plaque should read: "Pete Rose, more hits than anyone in MLB history, but he hit like a girl."

Well. Egomanical shit ranch it is, then. I rather disagree with Eric's "talent over guts" philosophy but I'm pretty sure that this bias isn't what drives his animus against Mr. Baseball. No, I think it's that Eric takes exception to Pete Rose being an egomanical shit ranch and with that I can't disagree.

This show is what they're basing their hopes on? Gimme a break! Idiots! Arggh!

Fox had one of the best shows in memory in their stable in 2002 -- the vastly underappreciated "Firefly". Having purchased the DVDs and finally watched the episodes in order, I can say that this show would have been their season. Dumb-asses!

I have been busy writing a screenplay for a dead show, over the past few days. It's a boatload of fun.

Die Fox, Die!

Having returned from flyover country seventeen pairs of socks richer, and bearing the bounty of "The Family Guy" on DVD as well as a new television, I welcome all and sundry back from their nondenominational yet subtly Judeo-Christian state-supported holidays.

Best gift: Rose Beranbaum Levy's "The Bread Bible", which contains enough wonkery for ten cookbooks (want to compensate, gram for gram, for the hydration levels of the salt you're adding to a recipe? Ever wondered how to convert recipes calling for active dry yeast into instant yeast? Ever wondered what the gluten-content difference was between Gold Medal and King Arthur all-purpose flours?), and makes incredibly good bread to boot. Well, I made incredibly good bread, but it was Levy's recipes. Highly, highly recommended.

Most necessary gift: Seventeen. Pairs. Of Socks.

And so, let's awaken from our tryptophan and sucrose slumbers to kick off the new year by reading this powerful and insightful piece by Aziz Poonawalla on being Muslim and being hated by other Muslims for your beliefs. On a pilgrimage to a holy spot in Yemen, he ran into trouble. Excerpt:

Inside... stood the young men, one armed with a nasty-looking rock. He made it clear in no uncertain terms (and despite the language barrier) that if we bent to our knees to prostrate, they would attack us. We were a small group of a half-dozen pilgrims surrounded by an entire village - but it was still enough to make me almost blind with rage. I could have snapped this fanatic in two, given his relative undernourished size. But even if we survived a confrontation, there would have been serious repercussions for the other pilgrims who were arriving later that day and the rest of the week. We were forced to grudgingly retreat, humiliated and seething with frustration at having our simple desire to express our devotion thwarted.

On the way out of the building, I deliberately dropped something I was holding right near the gravesite and then knelt to pick it up. In so doing I sneaked a hurried pseudo-prostration into my action. It escaped the notice of the rock-wielding fanatic and was, in retrospect, a foolish thing to have done. We encountered no resistance as we made our way back to our useless driver and vehicle, and began the long and bruising drive back to Hutaib.

Well, here we all are. And we are all here, which is a good thing, given that a big chunk of the planet can't stand us right now. Feel free to insert my standard "bush sucks" boilerplate here. But...my light reading for the plane ride home was Irshad Manji's "The Trouble With Islam". It's light fare, but quite sobering. She's decidedly on the opposite side of where I've been on certain issues, with regards to Islam...a lot of what she says rings true. If so, and I can't find a way around it, certain opinions of mine are going to have to change...

Greetings, 2004, the year of the robot. We are all on autopilot now, automatons entering a maze, programmed with a rule set for some reality. Let's hope our maze is roughly the same.

Comments are a service provided by the Ministry of Minor Perfidy to you, the gentle reader. This service is subject to revocation on a retail or wholesale basis at the whim of the Ministry. Only one individual has thus far incurred our wrath sufficiently to be permanently banned. Don’t be that guy. Any advertisement made in this space is subject to a fee of $500 per ad. Posting an ad indicates your agreement with this fee schedule. If you are a comment spammer, please immediately die a prolonged, agonizing and messy death. After you pay the fee.

Swear, curse and spit if it makes you feel better. Generally speaking, saying “fuck” a lot doesn’t improve the quality of your writing, unless you’re Charles Bukowski. I don’t think you’re Chuck, though. In any event, we won’t delete your post for foul language. As to general purpose offensiveness, we all have pretty thick skins and you’d have to be a real jackass to get a post deleted for that reason. So don’t be that guy.

To sum up: play nice, share your toys with the other kids, and pretend you’re having a nice conversation with friends at your favorite restaurant. And remember, we’re watching you.