The comments section...

So I read the comments section of the previous article, and it has this great howler:

"So you make 270,000,000.00$ pay 10% = 27,000,000$ in tax.Is that really fair to have to pay 27 million dollars to the government when half of the people in the US pay no tax at all? That 27 mil. would not count the payroll, state, local, school, taxes. Does not look fair to me.Amazing how we had NO federal taxes until the early 1900's.Mr.Bill"

Ah yes, let's return to the golden times of the nineteenth century.  Are you kidding me?  I love how libertarians and small government types idolize this fantasy land of no government.  Like everything would be so peachy without schools, roads, the internet, clean water, the police, and clean food.

And then there's also the old switcheroo:  Bill mentions payroll and state taxes when discussing taxes on the wealthy, but ignores then when discussing the poor who don't pay federal income taxes.

yuk!

The tax code punishes workers and favors the wealthy

NYT: Working All Day for the I.R.S.

Capital gains, investment income, all that is taxed at a lower rate than actual income.  This amounts to a policy of punishing work.

Defenders of the scheme like to argue that capital gains taxes are outrageous because it amounts to a double tax.

Of course, these defenders never suggest that we abolish the corporate tax and then equalize income treatment for all earners.

But there's more money in shilling for the super rich, so who really cares about intellectual honesty?

Buzz Bissinger on the death of independent Philly papers

Buzz Bissinger, who wrote Prayer for the City about Ed Rendell, has a NYTimes editorial about the impending death of independent Philadelphia newspapers, as a group of political interests, headed by Ed Rendell, is looking to buy up the local papers.

He argues that, without an independent voice, the local powers that are running Philly into the ground would have no effective check. It's an interesting idea. I have no idea what it would take for Philadelphia to get better. It's a shame. The city really is quite beautiful, and it has a rich history, but the politics of that city are thoroughly rotten.

Still, cheesesteaks!

Mitt Romney: good with sudden movements

David Brooks:

But Romney’s awkwardness seems to endear him to audiences, because he’s trying so hard. He spends an enormous amount of time after the speeches shaking hands, taking pictures and holding babies. Beads of sweat form on his forehead as he throws himself graciously into the crowds. He also has a nice startle response. When something unexpected happens, his face lights up and you get a burst of happy humanity out of him.

Mitt Romney: the perfect candidate for old timey flash photography.

No True Libertarianism...

Nice little blog post about how there is a lack of examples of successful libertarian regimes, or at least regimes which libertarians would accept as true libertarian governments. The basic problem is that, when the rubber hits the road, we're talking about anarchy and misery:

This, by the way, is why racism, theocracy and libertarianism go hand in hand, when from a philosophical point of view they should have little to do with one another. The negative effects of the lack of a central government are so obvious in developing countries that wherever the social order fails as in Somalia, it must have been due to bad religion, or the defect of having been born to an inferior race.

This, of course, isn't going to convince anybody on the Volokh Conspiracy, but it's a pretty persuasive point.

The Chemical Garden

Science experiments, ambient music, Thomas Mann, what more could you ask for?

Why Legal Education Sucks, Part 3567

Legal education and the heir of Slytherin:

Law schools and the country's largest law firms have long occupied — and jealously guarded — the most coveted corners in the American legal profession. Indeed, these institutions perpetuate each other's lock on power and prestige. Every city has its collection of "BigLaw" firms — highly leveraged partnerships performing a wide range of legal services on behalf of the corporate and institutional clients that control our society's greatest concentrations of wealth. BigLaw draws its talent from the most highly credentialed students emerging from our law schools. Without elite grades, no student stands a chance of scoring a BigLaw interview, let alone a BigLaw job.

All of this would make a little more sense if legal education bore any resemblance to the practice of law. Instead, it's a weird form of hazing.

Sometimes you don't get a second bite at the apple.

From Firedoglake, we have Debating the Effectiveness of the Latest Administration Housing Initiative:

The Administration can brag about all the housing programs they’ve put in place. But the truth is that because of HAMP and the other failures on this front, the link between borrowers and their government has been severed. I’m sure there is a large and growing universe of people who won’t take up this program because they’ve been burned one too many times. Or they’ve heard about a friend or neighbor who was burned. The danger from HAMP to liberal notions of government operating as a helping hand hasn’t been fully understood by the technocrats in Washington.

This reminds me of the "haircut" issue. The "haircut" issue is this - if you are uncertain about getting your hair cut, you can start conservatively, cutting only a little bit. If that turns out to be too little, you can always go back and trim more. Similarly, in policy making, you can respond to a problem by doing a little bit. If it's not enough, you can go back and do more.

Of course, in the real world, the consequence of doing too little and failing is often that your failure keeps you from doing anything more. Your stimulus wasn't enough? The failure of the stimulus to revive the economy is then used as proof that any stimulus wouldn't work. Similarly, if your homeowner assistance programs haven't worked in the past, maybe you won't be able to persuade homeowners to participate in the future.

The best policy is to get it right the first time.

But I worked hard to earn that money...

One of the lines I keep hearing in defense of Wall Street and against the protestors is some variation on "Shut your yap, work hard to earn like the Wall St people, or be grateful because they pay your taxes."

Why should anyone feel grateful for the financial sector?  Now, these people earned their money, at least in the sense that they paid their dues and devoted their lives to finance.  But is their reward of incredible wealth commensurate with the good they provide for society?  Three years into this economic mess, it's hard to believe that they're worth the trouble.

This is somewhat the theme of Paul Krugman today.  He says:

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. [....]

All of this was supposed to be justified by results: the paychecks of the wizards of Wall Street were appropriate, we were told, because of the wonderful things they did. Somehow, however, that wonderfulness failed to trickle down to the rest of the nation — and that was true even before the crisis. Median family income, adjusted for inflation, grew only about a fifth as much between 1980 and 2007 as it did in the generation following World War II, even though the postwar economy was marked both by strict financial regulation and by much higher tax rates on the wealthy than anything currently under political discussion.

Then came the crisis, which proved that all those claims about how modern finance had reduced risk and made the system more stable were utter nonsense. Government bailouts were all that saved us from a financial meltdown as bad as or worse than the one that caused the Great Depression.

You see, until a few weeks ago it seemed as if Wall Street had effectively bribed and bullied our political system into forgetting about that whole drawing lavish paychecks while destroying the world economy thing. Then, all of a sudden, some people insisted on bringing the subject up again.

In short, they weren't heroes - they royally screwed the pooch.  And they did so with a nice helping of government intervention.  Now, if these guys were all doing really great things, maybe I could buy the "they work hard for their paycheck," but they tanked our economy and then got the government to foot the bill for their fuckup.

Why anyone would defend such a practice is beyond me.