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A few years ago, you would have been right that numbers were basically flat, but at around the 43,000 mark, which held from around 1985 through 2005. After that, they started declining.

The CDC's numbers go through 2009 and cite a higher number of 33,800 for that year, but it's been trending downward consistently for decades. Deaths decreased about 9.7% from the prior year's 37,400, which itself was a decline of 9.3% from 2007. In fact, the last time deaths went up was in 2005 when they reached 43,500. By 2009, annual traffic deaths had dropped by nearly 29%. That's a pretty good rate for four years.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.xls

The most common automated traffic law enforcement is the red light camera, but several studies have said that it either does not change the accident rate or increases the accident rate at intersections where one is installed. The accident types change from T-bones to rear-end, but they still occur. A more effective and less-costly method of reducing intersection collisions due to red light runners is to extend yellow lights by a second or so and/or set the lights to all be red for a second or two between cycles. The same law is in effect and can be enforced when police see it, and costs to the municipality are lowered. So is revenue, but that's not what law enforcement is supposed to be about.

You should look up some time what "in poverty" actually means.

uh huh huh. I doubt it is anywhere in them there documents on that there website someplace. Fucking moron.

You should look up some time what "in poverty" actually means.

uh huh huh. I doubt it is anywhere in them there documents on that there website someplace. Fucking moron.

"s shares to be worth $50 million and is planning to book a trip to space with Virgin Galactic that would cost $200,000 or more" It is crazy to become wealthy then chance it all on being shot into space.

$200k out of $5M is hardly "all", it's like 4%. Many people spend a larger fraction of their savings on a new iPhone.

4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/

You should look up some time what "in poverty" actually means.

All 7.5 of them born every single minute in the U.S. alone.

Source: http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html

( Although I have to admit, that 0.5 baby is pretty darn special. )

Maybe they should define the lower bound for 'special' before even pondering whether or not the Earth falls within the definition. Then, if it doesn't, they can raise that lower bound until it does.

http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

First off, when you scroll down that same wikiMedia (not wikipedia) page you can find that other map/chart by the same author, which should make you question his/her "unbiased approach to the subject", or at least the precision of his/her data.
Also note that neither of those graphs are currently used - cause, you know... there are better and more precise ones.

Then there is the fact that neither of those maps currently used is of any particular value on its own.
ESPECIALLY those related to the headcounts.
Cause, while it may seem from the map of distribution that "Christians RULE!!111eleven!", from "religiosity" and "irreligion" maps one kinda gets the feeling that there may be a rather large percentage of bollocks in those stats.

Then, back to that graph, besides it being out of date - there is the fact that CIA's "The World Factbook" (which is the source of data for that graph) doesn't list its sources or methods or sample sizes.
Which makes it basically more akin to guesstimates than statistics.
They can't even be bothered to be up to date with readily available data on USA, let alone the rest of the world.
And where they pulled those numbers on protestants from is anyone's guess.

So, I wouldn't really bet the farm on those 55.6% you got from that graph.
Particularly when taken into account the fact that it's mostly the people in "undeveloped countries" who give credence to the stories in ANY of the religious books.

And that's all without going into the whole "it's a packaged deal" thing where you can't pick and choose the bits of God's words you'll believe in - making all of them unbelievers to some extent.

ArcGIS is fucking expensive though. I use it for work and we are paying huge amounts in license fees. A single license is cheaper ($1500 I believe) but is still a very hard expensive exercise.

You need shapefiles of the New York zip code boundaries. Quick Google search gives me this:

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/z52000.html#shp

If you want to view and edit shapefiles and don't want to pay or pirate ArcGIS, there are several open source alternatives. I recommend QuantumGIS. It has all the facilities for most common tasks and also scriptable using Python.

If QuantumGIS is not your cup of tea, MapWindow is another good one. It is much more lightweight and also can do majority of common functions.

4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/

Terrible, yes, but it also depends on how you define "poverty". The definition has changed over the years, and loosened over recent decades.

Only some subset of that group is in actual poverty.

(Besides, this looks like a hit on Rick Perry. I don't support him, but come on. Really?)

Have you got evidence that the NBA in fact doesn't reflect society? Yes, we can all think of why there might be more black 7 foot tall guys in the NBA that in society, but there's no excuse for not having the evidence to hand. The assumption that evidence will turn out as expected, especially for things that seem obvious, will make people not bother to check reality against what they're saying. This goes for all sorts of issues, such as the cause of ulcers, whether lower taxes increase government revenue, whether people act rationally, and so on.

Yes.

"Apparently the league is currently 71.8 percent African-American, 18.3 percent international and 9.9 percent white American and there's a problem."

Need more?

"For some reason, blacks have come to represent the vast majority of players in the NBA, even though they form only 12 percent of the U.S. population."

The above quotes are from links available on the first page of the search results I linked to. They represent the trend of data returned by the Search, and are not intended to be linked directly to the articles in question.

United States Census Info (to reflect "society")

White persons, percent, 2010 (a) 72.4%
Black persons, percent, 2010 (a) 12.6%
American Indian and Alaska Native persons, percent, 2010 (a) 0.9%
Asian persons, percent, 2010 (a) 4.8%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, percent, 2010 (a) 0.2%
Persons reporting two or more races, percent, 2010 2.9%
Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2010 (b) 16.3%
White persons not Hispanic, percent, 2010 63.7%

some lard ass to taser everyone he sees in the name of policing,

If you want better cops, you need to pay better salaries to attract more qualified people and pay for more training.

According to this, a policeman's salary begins at $52-55K, tops $62K in the 3rd year of service, can go over $80K after 5 years and over $100K for sergeants or commanders.
Compare this to the median HOUSEHOLD income of $49.5K and median earnings of $47,715 (for men) and $36,931 (for women) as reported on census.org.

It is my strong conviction that cops are paid enough for a job that requires a high school diploma with a fatality rate between taxi drivers and garbage collectors.

No, if you want better cops, get rid of the corruption and the "blue wall of silence".

You'd think they'd contact AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to make sure an alert like this went to all US cellphones. AT&T has 107 million US customers and Verizon has another 107 million so combined that covers 2/3rds of all Americans

Facebook would be another one I'd contact to see if an alert system could be put in place.

>> 4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/

The other some odd 2,487,922 are paying Texas traffic ticket SURCHARGES.

I hadn't heard of this, so I googled "texas ticket surcharge."

If you go to Texas, you'll pay for it the rest of your life.

Unreal. I don't even have it in me to make a jab at Republicans over this. I mean... holy shit, Texas. Holy fucking shit. I'm not mad, or angry, or even disappointed. I'm stunned.

One thing that really took me by pleasant surprise was Google's non-English transliteration engine built into edit boxes/text compose windows of all google sites. English has just five vowels with y and w coming in very occasionally to support vowel sounds . Most Asian languages have distinct glyphs for at least 12 vowels (long and short forms separated and a few more). Google allows me to type using an English key board, when I hit a space, it changes text to the selected Indian language. If the text is not exact, I press backspace, and it creates a drop down box that typically has a few variations, and I am surprised how good its guesses are about what I was planning to type.

If Google has been collecting such data about the most common english transliteration for the most common words in other languages, it has a treasure trove of stuff. If that probability engine could be adapted to voice, it would have a global reach. If Siri has an American English focus, its lead is definitely not two years. Do not count the non-native English speakers out. Hispanic population is increasing and they use smart phones to access the net mostly. On the high end, the median family income of Asian Americans is the highest for any ethnic group. Almost double that of Hispanics, the lowest. That probably would make the ratio 3 or even 4 when it comes to disposable income. Citation provided. Unless they tackle both ends of the income spectrum, siri is not going to make as big a wave as these talking heads are talking about.

Yes. If you examine income expeditures and compare that with the ownership numbers you might find me completely mistaken. However, I think this document proves my point. Stock Ownership by Age of Family Head and Family Income If you read it you will see that few people have more than 50% of their assets tied up in the market so I assumed a wash with a benefit towards people owned money by companies and those having to completely rely on Social Security. Money invested in the market would drop in value; though, I think it is really dependent on the area of the market. Money companies owe to retirees would negatively effect the company, assuming the company was using that money as investment capital and just calling it the retirement fund -- which we all know is always the case. If not, it would positively effect the retirees.

Yes. If you examine income expeditures and compare that with the ownership numbers you might find me completely mistaken. However, I think this document proves my point. Stock Ownership by Age of Family Head and Family Income If you read it you will see that few people have more than 50% of their assets tied up in the market so I assumed a wash with a benefit towards people owned money by companies and those having to completely rely on Social Security. Money invested in the market would drop in value; though, I think it is really dependent on the area of the market. Money companies owe to retirees would negatively effect the company, assuming the company was using that money as investment capital and just calling it the retirement fund -- which we all know is always the case. If not, it would positively effect the retirees.

Yes. If you examine income expeditures and compare that with the ownership numbers you might find me completely mistaken. However, I think this document proves my point. Stock Ownership by Age of Family Head and Family Income If you read it you will see that few people have more than 50% of their assets tied up in the market so I assumed a wash with a benefit towards people owned money by companies and those having to completely rely on Social Security. Money invested in the market would drop in value; though, I think it is really dependent on the area of the market. Money companies owe to retirees would negatively effect the company, assuming the company was using that money as investment capital and just calling it the retirement fund -- which we all know is always the case. If not, it would positively effect the retirees.

Might help to actually include the link.

I was just about to make this exact point... Access to money or resources in general changes the problem.

There is zero evidence of this, and growing evidence that it's not true. The biggest spending on public education in the United States is in the Washington D.C. area. That area has some of the worst scores and graduation rates in the country. Utah, by contrast, is ranked near the bottom in states and territories... 51st... and has one of the better test score and graduation rates in the country.

You can pour all the money in the world into a school, with all the latest equipment, plentiful staff, and good facilities, and your kids are going to fail if two things aren't present: parents that give a damn, and a community culture that values education and achievement. No amount of funding is going to buy those things.

All of my numbers are based on this document from the Census bureau. Average cost when you were in college was a little under $7000 a year, excluding room and board (you're 30, so I'm assuming you started school in 1998-1999). With room and board you'd be looking at an average of $12,000. Today (well in 2007, which was 4 years ago) you're looking at an average of 11034 without room and board, and 19232 with. What's scary is they went up consistently by about 300$ a semester through the first part of the 2000's, and then suddenly start increasing by 600-700-800$ a year.At that rate, i think you'd be hard pressed these days. If someone had to board at school, they'd be looking at a 50 hour workweek outside of class, and that's only if their wages were untaxed (imagining that the student was able to find a minimum wage job). We use minimum wage because college students are largely inexperienced, unskilled workers - the people who usually work minimum wage jobs. So its not really that bad of an indicator - the median income would include people who are well established financially which would heavily skew earning power. This said, that's really awesome you were able to work your way through, and you should be proud. I'm hoping to god I can get out of debt in decent enough time that I can help my kid pay for school.

Contrary to your apparent worldview, the vast majority of folks in the lower half of the income scale in this country do not have investment portfolios and are simply struggling to feed their families or pay rent.

The median household income across all households in the US is ~$80,000. I would HARDLY call that "struggling to feed their families". I personally know folks whos median income is under $40k for a household of 6, and THEY arent even struggling (and its not because of difficulties getting a job).

Struggling to feed your family isnt really even possible in this country because of all the social safety nets we have; you can have no money, no job, no family, and no friends and STILL have a warm place to sleep and food to eat in this country (though it wouldnt really be what you would call a comfortable existence).

Really, you should come back to reality. There arent people starving to death in the streets in this country, and those who do, do because-- and my sympathies go out to them, but this is the brutal reality-- they do not take the initiative to get food. That is, it ISNT an issue of food being unavailable. The rare exceptions to this are the elderly, where their families did not make sure someone was able to care for them and feed them-- but again its not an issue of "food wasnt available" as much as "people not being able to attend to their personal basic needs".

The bit about how some people misinterpret the amount of free memory the OS reports is totally true, though.

That's the same pathology that has plagued humanity for all of history. The idiot says: "hey, look at all the memory it's hogging! ... wait a minute, do I actually understand anything about these figures and how they are accounted for and what they mean? I sure don't. Fuck it, I'm going to form a highly vocal opinion about it anyway!"

That's like the user "sgt scrub" whose sig says "4,143,077 Texans live in poverty. 1,655,085 of them are children. http://www.census.gov/". Do you know what this means? It means 2,487,992 adults said "hey, I'm living in poverty, I can't afford to make ends meet, I spend nearly as much or more than I make ... wow I know exactly what I should do. I'll have unprotected sex and bring a child into poverty! What a great idea! Damn I'll make such a fine parent."

Agree full heartily. I am currently trying to create a map book geared for hunting and the outdoors in Minnesota. All of the data is freely available (the state of Minnesota has gigs of info freely available) online from various sources. Also there are open source tools to create impressive maps freely available. Add in a bit of effort and self publishing sites like Lulu.com (anyone know of other good ones I could look into) and as an amateur one can probably become successful. Do I ever expect to become rich off this effort, no. Would I mind if I ended up with enough money from this endeavor to purchase a nice 40 acre plot up in the north woods because of it, not at all. I would love it if I could sell one copy to each deer hunter in Minnesota but I doubt I will ever approach that number.

So why am I doing this? Because I looked at maps geared towards hunters and outdoor people and discovered that most of them completely suck and those that don't suck completely still suck as they have incomplete info or the wrong type of info for what a hunter would care about. Again here I am doing it because I want to have a nice spiral bound map book (saddle stitched or stapled never lays flat) for myself and I find it fun. My test maps that I take hunting and hand out to others in the party have proven incredibly useful in finding public land and knowing what to expect before you get there. I know I will probably sell a few copies, mostly to those in my hunting party but anything beyond that would just be icing on the cake.

That's funny, because U.S. governments (federal, state and local) employ about 3,809,697 full time and 1,521,698 part time people according to the census.

If you're talking about the "stimulus" packages they've been somewhat undersized for the U.S. economy (on the order of 1-2% of GDP). They haven't net created job but have assuredly reduced job losses. The best estimate, is I understand around 1-2 million fewer jobs lost from the parts that actually involved stimulus. On the other hand, the part of the package which consisted of roughly the same amount of lost revenue in tax give aways has had no measurable impact at all on job creation or stopping job losses.

Your ignorant rant annoys me. The fact that the state is almost 40% Hispanic doesn't play well with your caricature of the uneducated inbred racist Texan voter, and does little to bring any useful discussion of ideas to the table. What is needed is a government composed of individuals that can be trusted, as it's the well placed fear of government screw ups that feeds this anti-government sentiment.

I'm sure there are people that are in poverty b/c of their choices, just as their are people that are rich despite their choices. But I find it very difficult to believe that someone making less than $10,000/year really has a lot of upward mobility available to them, barring a few exceptional cases. Someone making less than $5000/year is probably close to starving, especially in a metro area. So we're talking 3.5 million households that are on the desperate edge, another 6 million that probably have little hope of a brighter future. And that's actually households, not individuals. So some of those making $10,000 might be supporting a family of four. Sure, there are people in complete shit-holes around the world that are worse off, but that sounds bad enough to me to deserve a little help and sympathy.

As for the violence, I'm sure you're right (I've never lived anywhere that was truly poor in that sense). But rather than just condemning these people b/c of this, it makes more sense to me to look at the factors that lead to poor people being so much more likely to engage in these behaviors and doing what we can to offset those factors (lack of education and true opportunity spring to mind). It seems a bit too easy to simply wave away the correlation between poverty and crime as saying "people that make poor choices that lead to poverty are more likely to be the kind of person that engages in crime". Especially considering that the poverty levels are rising - what percentage of the population can we just wave off as being ignorant thugs responsible for their own lack of success?

I know I am not supposed to feed the trolls but this is just too much. Not to mention the comment has +3 insightful. "Government is evil by it's very nature" right... I assume this is coming from an even more warped understanding of the popular lie "more government means less freedom" so I will rebut that. Rebutting the original quote is barely worth the few seconds it takes to say 'what the fuck are you on?'
If more government so obviously correlated with less freedom, we should be able to see that in evidence. Lets take the measures of government to be number of employees, number of pages of legislation, and amount of yearly government revenue. According to this the countries with the most government are all the old countries, ie western and northern Europe and the UK, and also the newer country, the USA which has been adept at enlarging it's government faster than most. Now we compare these countries to the countries with the least government: Somalia, DRCongo, Southern Sudan, Afghanistan, cambodia, haiti etc. These countries have almost no government. As you can see, less government correlates with less freedom, and also more violence. Does anyone have any evidence whatsoever that points the other way?
I can explain why this is in a historical context and what government is actually for, for those of us like Archangel Michael here who failed political studies. Government used to be small and simple, there was a ruler called a king (there are many other titles as well but they all mean roughly the same thing) and in essence just one law: 'the kings word is law'. Some people thought this was unfair, and decided to invent the idea of the constitution, which provided a set of laws that the state and king were bound to governing people's basic rights. This worked so well that the idea caught on and got expanded upon, creating more and more laws to protect the rights of individuals and societies from the abuses of unchecked power. From this came such freedoms as emancipation, suffrage, tolerable working conditions, social welfare, healthcare, police protection, a fair judicial system, etc. The list goes on. The logical fallacy here is that government is being equated with power. More power is indeed correlated with less freedom. But less government results in fact in more unchecked power. Taking away the government does not reduce the amount of power being wielded, it merely takes away the controls on how that power is wielded.
With regard to the tax question, I think someone on this thread should point out that almost a quarter of us children and young people are living in poverty. Perhaps we should contact the UN world food programme.

With nearly 50% of the US paying no federal income tax, they have no problem asking for "more". Want to be 'fair'? Get rid of the EIC -- or at least prevent it from giving back MORE money that was originally paid by the recipient.

Now that's what I call class warfare. And so unlike raising taxes on people who can afford them, it is indeed rotten economics.

Have you looked at the actual table? For a single person, the Earned Income Tax Credit isn't available if (s)he earns more than $13,460. That's comparable to the US Census Poverty Threshold of $11,344 (for a person younger than 65). If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, people who have an income might actually starve, go homeless, etc. So when I say this is class warfare, it is only because it could actually kill the working poor.

In contrast, the wealthy really can afford it without noticing. There was an interesting New York Times article on this recently, which linked to this Citizens for Tax Justice fact sheet. If you read through it, you'll see that the revenue from increasing the tax rate on the top 1% by income would be similar to that of raising it on the bottom 60% by the same percentage. I assure you, there will be enough left over to provide basic necessities of life! (In fact, I'm not in the top 1%, but I certainly could pay more taxes without great hardship. It might mean it'd take me longer to afford a house, but I'm not exactly homeless in my 2-bedroom rented townhouse.)

If you're not swayed by arguments such as "don't kill people with taxes", then consider no taxes on poor people an investment. If they have all of a home, healthy food on the table, adequate medical care, a quality education, and available jobs, it's reasonable to believe that many of them will go on to become middle-class tax-payers: enough so to pay back your investment with far more than the nominal 1% tax rate you're suggesting. In fact, by effectively selling too soon, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll throw away what you put in with that government-provided K12 education and the like.

I'm saddened by the fact that society has somehow gotten to the point where the "logic" of "he has more so we can steal it from him!" some how is both morally and ethically justifiable. Hell, why stop at 50%? By your so called logic we surely can justify taking 95% of what they earn. They can afford it, right?

I believe the idea was at least to take away with is basically wealth redistribution at gun point. EIC is basically that. Take from everyone else, at gunpoint by way of threat of jail, and give it to someone else. Apparently if you do that as an individual, armed robbery, it is viewed as morally wrong. If you do it with the power of government then suddenly what was wrong is now right. How exactly can it be right for "all of us", in the form of the government, to forcibly take money from one party and give it to another when it would be wrong for any individual in that group to do so? How does the super class of "government" gain powers that the individual does not have?

With nearly 50% of the US paying no federal income tax, they have no problem asking for "more". Want to be 'fair'? Get rid of the EIC -- or at least prevent it from giving back MORE money that was originally paid by the recipient.

Now that's what I call class warfare. And so unlike raising taxes on people who can afford them, it is indeed rotten economics.

Have you looked at the actual table? For a single person, the Earned Income Tax Credit isn't available if (s)he earns more than $13,460. That's comparable to the US Census Poverty Threshold of $11,344 (for a person younger than 65). If not for the Earned Income Tax Credit, people who have an income might actually starve, go homeless, etc. So when I say this is class warfare, it is only because it could actually kill the working poor.

In contrast, the wealthy really can afford it without noticing. There was an interesting New York Times article on this recently, which linked to this Citizens for Tax Justice fact sheet. If you read through it, you'll see that the revenue from increasing the tax rate on the top 1% by income would be similar to that of raising it on the bottom 60% by the same percentage. I assure you, there will be enough left over to provide basic necessities of life! (In fact, I'm not in the top 1%, but I certainly could pay more taxes without great hardship. It might mean it'd take me longer to afford a house, but I'm not exactly homeless in my 2-bedroom rented townhouse.)

If you're not swayed by arguments such as "don't kill people with taxes", then consider no taxes on poor people an investment. If they have all of a home, healthy food on the table, adequate medical care, a quality education, and available jobs, it's reasonable to believe that many of them will go on to become middle-class tax-payers: enough so to pay back your investment with far more than the nominal 1% tax rate you're suggesting. In fact, by effectively selling too soon, you're virtually guaranteeing you'll throw away what you put in with that government-provided K12 education and the like.

Now apply those numbers to something useful. In CA there are 5,132,640 people living in poverty 1,846,994 of them are children. In NH 110,769 people live in poverty 31,278 of them are children. These numbers do not include illegal aliens afraid of taking the senses. I'd willing to be large sums of money NH doesn't have as many illegal aliens as CA.

http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/saipe/saipe.cgi http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/maps/index.html

Now apply those numbers to something useful. In CA there are 5,132,640 people living in poverty 1,846,994 of them are children. In NH 110,769 people live in poverty 31,278 of them are children. These numbers do not include illegal aliens afraid of taking the senses. I'd willing to be large sums of money NH doesn't have as many illegal aliens as CA.

http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/saipe/saipe.cgi http://www.census.gov/did/www/saipe/data/maps/index.html

what is California doing to attract and retain businesses?

Our property taxes per dollar value are among the lowest in the nation, thank to prop 13 (part of the reason income and sales taxes are high). Property is assessed at its original purchase price plus a 2% annual increase. Long term property holders pay a fraction of the taxes as similar holders in other states. California ranks 14th in per capita property tax collections ( http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/251.html ). New Hampshire ranks 4th, Vermont ranks 7th, Wyoming has the second highest. Are businesses fleeing these states due to high taxes?

We are the only major oil-producing state that does not tax this resource. Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, all do so.

In 2009 California passed a large corporate tax cut, providing billions of dollars in savings to the state's largest corporations: http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=xzsczul8kiltna , quoting : “This is the gutting of the state corporate tax,” said “In fact, they did it so badly that lawyers are chuckling about the opportunities for tax avoidance.”

California ranks 10th in total state taxes per capita ( http://www.census.gov/govs/statetax/05staxrank.html . Alaska, Wyoming, and Minnesota all rank higher. Are businesses fleeing these states?

what is California doing to attract and retain businesses?

Our property taxes per dollar value are among the lowest in the nation, thank to prop 13 (part of the reason income and sales taxes are high). Property is assessed at its original purchase price plus a 2% annual increase. Long term property holders pay a fraction of the taxes as similar holders in other states. California ranks 14th in per capita property tax collections ( http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/251.html ). New Hampshire ranks 4th, Vermont ranks 7th, Wyoming has the second highest. Are businesses fleeing these states due to high taxes?

We are the only major oil-producing state that does not tax this resource. Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, all do so.

In 2009 California passed a large corporate tax cut, providing billions of dollars in savings to the state's largest corporations: http://www.capitolweekly.net/article.php?xid=xzsczul8kiltna , quoting : “This is the gutting of the state corporate tax,” said “In fact, they did it so badly that lawyers are chuckling about the opportunities for tax avoidance.”

California ranks 10th in total state taxes per capita ( http://www.census.gov/govs/statetax/05staxrank.html . Alaska, Wyoming, and Minnesota all rank higher. Are businesses fleeing these states?

One BIG factor I can show you by phone is housing. Even postv bubble.

http://www.census.gov/const/uspriceann.pdf

You see a 10-fold increase between 1970 and 2010. You inflation adjusted wages aren't even 2fold

Sure, but next year's accident statistics are likely to be proportional to the number of cars/traffic/congestion no matter what.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2011/tables/11s1103.pdf

Item Unit 1980 1990 1995 2000 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Traffic death rates:
Per 100 million vehicle miles ........ Rate ..... 3.3 2.1 1.7 1.5 1.4 1.5 1.4 1.4 1.3
Per 100,000 licensed drivers ........ Rate ..... 35.2 26.7 23.7 22.0 21.5 21.7 21.1 20.1 17.9
Per 100,000 registered vehicles ..... Rate ..... 34.8 24.2 21.2 19.3 18.0 17.7 17.0 16.1 14.5
Per 100,000 resident population ..... Rate ..... 22.5 17.9 15.9 14.9 14.6 14.7 14.3 13.7 12.3

1. The tax foundation.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/topic/92.html
for an updated one. A major news outlet is about the least worthwhile source ever.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/22685.html
That is sourced from the census consolidated federal funds report from 2005.

Here is a link to that.
http://www.census.gov/govs/cffr/
Page 23 of the 2009 report should prove interesting to you.

My source is official US census data.
Median household income, 2009 $50,221
$383,000,000 / $50221 = 7626.3

So $383 million is more than the total income of 7626 dead-center middleclass American households.

I did a separate Google search to come up with an average of 2.63 persons per US household. So they are giving him a bonus equal to the entire GDP of a US city of over twenty thousand typical middle class Americans. And as the post title points out, that doesn't include his (unknown) paycheck.

The point of my earlier reply seems to have flown well over your head.

As far as I can tell the point of your previous post to illustrate "how not to apply percentages". A person getting 1% of the US GDP would be insanity beyond belief. A person getting 1% of the GDP of a country of 10 people would be in deep poverty. Equating the same percentage in the two case is horribly broken.

Your calculation was:
Gross Domestic Product of USA = $14.66 trillion
$383 million / $14.66 trillion = 0.0026% of GDP
0.0026% of Dominica's $376M GDP = $9823
$9823 / 10 years = $982

A more valid calculation for that case would be:
Gross Domestic Product of USA = $14.66 trillion
Population of US = 312 million
income per person = $14.66 trillion / 312 million = $46,987
$383 million / $46,987 = one person getting 8151 shares of income

Gross Domestic Product Dominica $376M
Population Dominica = 72500
income per person = $376M / 72500 = $5186 ($14 dollars a day)
one person getting 8151 shares of income = $5186 * 8151 = $42 million

If you want to divide that over ten years, sure, it's someone getting a bonus of $4.2 million per year in relation to $5186 per person per year for everyone else. And if we're going to divide up the bonus over the ten years then we really need to add in whatever his yearly salary is.

And your comment about "talented" doesn't fly. A talented person can definitely earn many times the average income. But when someone in an income-$5186-per-person-nation is getting a $4.2 million bonus per year, or when someone in the $46,987-per-person-income-US is getting $38.3 million per year bonus, it's not because he's talented. It's because the economy is dysfunctional, and it's because he's got the political connections or billionaire-business connections to benefit from that economic dysfunction.

And furthermore, the $383 million bonus value is based on today's stock price remaining flat for ten years. A stock price that remains flat is downright rotten performance for a CEO. From 1900 through 2010 the Dow Jones had an average rate of return of 9.4% (in stock price and dividends). If he achieves a grossly lackluster 3% yearly increase in stock price it would make his bonus $514 million. Over a half-billion dollars. If he did an average CEO job his bonus would be $940 million. And when you add in his actually salary his pay for doing an average performance as CEO it would be over a billion dollars. Yeah, it's a billion+ dollars over ten years. But you still can't claim that pay scale for average stock performance reflects any legitimate or sane or economically healthy "talent" pay.

This is exactly the sort of thing that has been weakening the US economy. Look at this graph. Advancing technologies and efficiencies increase GDP over time, but almost exactly ZERO of that growth has made it into the pockets of the majority of Americans. The rising blue line shows increased economic production, and the difference between the red and blue lines shows that all growth is removed from the pockets of the majority of Americans and ALL being poured into a few ultra-wealthy pockets. That graph is showing the Paris-Hilton-Taxcuts, it's showing TrickleDownEconomics that never trickles down. It shows two dec

"Poverty, AFAIC, is created by government spending (and regulating/taxing/subsidizing) and wealth is created by the private sector investment. Government is not (or shouldn't be) here to invest. It's here with a specific spending function - protect liberties. That's all that all of the government must be concerned with."

Have you read the United States Constitution?

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

Article 1, Section 8
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

General Welfare means social programs, they aren't theft, and the US began taxation programs during the Washington administration.

As for the statement that no one paid income tax in the 1950s, that is just ridiculous, there were accountants, there were ledgers and people went to prison for tax evasion.
http://ntu.org/tax-basics/history-of-federal-individual-1.html
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/popscan/p60-018.pdf
1952-53 - 22.2% on income above $4000.
92% at $400,000.
Average income was $4011
And the bulk of US households made more than $4000 a year.

If welfare is evil, does the US military-industrial complex strike you as evil? Lockheed Martin for example makes the vast majority of it's income from US government contracts, as does Northrop Grumman, General Dynamic Land Systems, TRW and many others.

Firewood is a renewable resource. It just takes a lot of land to grow enough trees to heat a house, and there are more economical ways to use the fuel.

Geothermal should be good for some of the energy. Accelerating transfer of heat from the planet's core to the atmosphere will help radiate off that heat. If we need to, we can paint the planet white with airdrops of aluminum oxide. Algae fuels trap carbon temporarily. There are some other things we can do. Not that it matters.

There are almost 7 billion of us now (according to this 6,955,578,309 at this writing, 7 billion this year). 43 years ago it was half as many, and 55 years prior it was half of that. Continuing this trend, it was it was 1780 - about 230 years ago, or 120 years for another halving. Do you see where the steps get longer the further you go back? Some of the acceleration in growth rate is medicine, some is energy science, some is transportation. Science is killing us by allowing a yeast-growth law. If we had universal free power with perfect conversion, we'd find a way to get to 14 billion in 35 years and 28 billion in 60. Imagine that... 2071: some of my children are still alive and the world has 28 billion people in it. Yes, I know - the UN expects the accelerating growth trend of the last thousand years to suddenly reverse direction, much like the WP7 team expects their fortunes to turn around - for no discernable reason. I believe the UN estimates wrongly include many bilions of people starving to death, and I think we'll prevent that for the most part with humanitarian efforts, though of course many will die by famine where inserting food by force isn't feasible due to determined armed opposition.

By 2071 we'll be out of oil of course, having even tapped the arctic and antarctic reserves. We'll be digging out the last of the coal having doubled, redoubled and re-redoubled those efforts, and global climate will be at least 3C above present - which means British summers will be pleasant but the winters still intolerable, larger swaths of Africa and southern India will be uninhabitable but Frazier Island will be a destination resort. (Nonseq: that bay looks like a crater to me.) We'll have surrendered to gene mod crops and nuclear power, so vast swaths of the Earth will be unihabitable due to grey goo and nuclear meltdowns. Thermodynamics being what they are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be irreversibly melting, but it will still be a long time before they do melt and raise the level of the sea and vanishing Florida beneath the waves. Ice is not a great thermoconductor, so outer layers of ice delay the eventual flood that will come. Plenty of time for folks to move inland. Of course if you do the math by then the US National Debt is $4 quadrillion at least, and some models escape to infinity which obviously can't happen (can it?)

The world had 1.5 billion people when my great-grandmother was born, and I knew her. My eldest grandson is two years old. If the current trend continues my youngest great-grandson will die amongst a crowd of over 200 billion humans. Assuming: my youngest daughter is 5 now, and will have a child at 35 as her mother did (2041), and that youngest grandchild will have a child at 35 (2076) also that brings us to 65 years hence, or 2076 born and 84 years of life (assumes a lack of medical advances) gives the year 2161 to naturally pass on. It would take several medical miracles to allow me to meet this great-grandchild, but those are expected. On the current trend 200 billion world population is a fairly conservative estimate for 2161. But of course the current trend can't continue unless the future brings something I don't know about.

I used to worry a lot about this stuff - but you know what? In the longer view these problems solve themselves. We're fortunate

Interesting - thanks for the additional info.

Of course, the "fairest" system would be a single flat income tax or a single consumption tax (where here I'm defining "fairest" as "each person pays an equal share of what they earn/spend"). Then, using your figures above, the 56% of earners making less than $100K would contribute 56% of the revenue. The benefits of such a system would include eliminating the enormous tax-preparation industry that exists simply because the tax code has become so confusing and complicated.

Are you using the stats here http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm ?

What's interesting is that if you plot this data out, comparing share of income with share of households, some things jump out:

- from about $52K to $100K, share of income almost exactly matches share of households;

- from $100K to $150K, the share of income jumps dramatically compared to the share of households: the percentage of all households in this division is 11.54% however this group earns 20.70% of all income, the second largest discrepancy;

- for the groups in the $150K to $200K and $200K to $250K, the discrepancy drops (to 4.10% households/10.42% income and 1.53%/5.04% respectively);

- at $250K+ the discrepancy rises again dramatically, to 1.93%/13.01% (the biggest point spread of all);

- the halfway point for households is about $50K: 51.36% of households make less than that while 48.64% make more. The share of income is 19.47% ($50K);

- there are almost certainly some extreme outliers at the top end.

Unless you have a system whereby the government entirely dictates who gets what, there will always be natural discrepancies between share of households and share of income, just as two people who sit in adjacent cubicles may make different salaries based on their perceived worth to their employer. And there will always be those who decry any result as "unfair". I guess the better question is: is it possible for a household to make the jump from one income tier to the next?

I arbitrarily picked 2002 data (which you can find here: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032003/hhinc/new06_000.htm) and compared it to the 2007 data. This shows that the number of households in virtually every category below $85K decreased (notable exception: the number of households earning between $70K and $72.5K increased 11.84%) while the number of households above $85K increased, in many cases dramatically (for example: number of households earning $85K to $87.5K increased 5.39%; $87.5K - $90K: +6.94%; $90K - $92.5K: +8.19%; $92.5K - $95K: +11.52%; etc.).

What can one conclude from this? Well, everyone seems to be making more money (note: the data does not seem to correct for inflation, but inflation has been historically low during the sample period). The rich are getting richer, if you define rich as those making more than $85K. The richest households saw the greatest number of new entrants: there was a dramatic increase in the number of households earning $100K - $150K (+27.46%), $150K - $200K (+53.08%), $200K - $250K (+47.62%) and 250K+ (+45.97%). My quick analysis of that leads me to believe people are capable of bettering their place on the income ladder in the US. YMMV.

Interesting - thanks for the additional info.

Of course, the "fairest" system would be a single flat income tax or a single consumption tax (where here I'm defining "fairest" as "each person pays an equal share of what they earn/spend"). Then, using your figures above, the 56% of earners making less than $100K would contribute 56% of the revenue. The benefits of such a system would include eliminating the enormous tax-preparation industry that exists simply because the tax code has become so confusing and complicated.

Are you using the stats here http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm ?

What's interesting is that if you plot this data out, comparing share of income with share of households, some things jump out:

- from about $52K to $100K, share of income almost exactly matches share of households;

- from $100K to $150K, the share of income jumps dramatically compared to the share of households: the percentage of all households in this division is 11.54% however this group earns 20.70% of all income, the second largest discrepancy;

- for the groups in the $150K to $200K and $200K to $250K, the discrepancy drops (to 4.10% households/10.42% income and 1.53%/5.04% respectively);

- at $250K+ the discrepancy rises again dramatically, to 1.93%/13.01% (the biggest point spread of all);

- the halfway point for households is about $50K: 51.36% of households make less than that while 48.64% make more. The share of income is 19.47% ($50K);

- there are almost certainly some extreme outliers at the top end.

Unless you have a system whereby the government entirely dictates who gets what, there will always be natural discrepancies between share of households and share of income, just as two people who sit in adjacent cubicles may make different salaries based on their perceived worth to their employer. And there will always be those who decry any result as "unfair". I guess the better question is: is it possible for a household to make the jump from one income tier to the next?

I arbitrarily picked 2002 data (which you can find here: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032003/hhinc/new06_000.htm) and compared it to the 2007 data. This shows that the number of households in virtually every category below $85K decreased (notable exception: the number of households earning between $70K and $72.5K increased 11.84%) while the number of households above $85K increased, in many cases dramatically (for example: number of households earning $85K to $87.5K increased 5.39%; $87.5K - $90K: +6.94%; $90K - $92.5K: +8.19%; $92.5K - $95K: +11.52%; etc.).

What can one conclude from this? Well, everyone seems to be making more money (note: the data does not seem to correct for inflation, but inflation has been historically low during the sample period). The rich are getting richer, if you define rich as those making more than $85K. The richest households saw the greatest number of new entrants: there was a dramatic increase in the number of households earning $100K - $150K (+27.46%), $150K - $200K (+53.08%), $200K - $250K (+47.62%) and 250K+ (+45.97%). My quick analysis of that leads me to believe people are capable of bettering their place on the income ladder in the US. YMMV.

You prefer monarchy?

Any way some statistics if someone wants to read them:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html

As a Canadian living under a (constitutional) Monarchy: yes I do.

And did economist Mark Jacobson pull these "estimates" right out of his ass?

It takes two seconds to look up the numbers and see that as cars have been getting more fuel efficient, they've also been getting safer. The Census has done the work for us. Just look at the fatality trends [census.gov] for passenger cars and light trucks since 1990. Even with total miles driven in the U.S. climbing from just over a trillion miles in 1970 to peaking over three trillion miles in in 2008, you can see the fatality rate for passenger cars plummeting during that time period (even on a per-mile basis) and fatality rate for light trucks staying about the same.

The data just doesn't at all support what this guy is saying. Also, anyone with a functioning brain should understand that injury mitigation in the case of an accident is only one piece of the pie. Accident avoidance prevents traffic fatalities as well (in fact, I'd rather work on avoiding accidents in the first place than mitigating their impact once they happen). Heavy, gas guzzling vehicles have a greatly diminished ability to safely avoid collisions compared to smaller, more manageable cars.

You prefer monarchy? Any way some statistics if someone wants to read them: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/transportation/motor_vehicle_accidents_and_fatalities.html

> and all the other things I'm forgetting to mention - will stay here.

I think you are confused with another United States. The US exports just about everything it can get it's hands on (including fish) http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2009/tables/09s1267.xls

Per capita money income in past 12 months (2009 dollars) 2005-2009 $27,041;
Median household income, 2009 $50,221;
Population, 2010 308,745,538
07/27/2011 Debt Held by the Public $9,747,742,929,867.95 + Intragovernmental Holdings $4,595,076,219,736.81 = Total Public Debt Outstanding $14,342,819,149,604.76

debt $14,342,819,149,604.76 / Population, 2010 308,745,538 = $46,455.15 per capita debt;
so my statement was overly strong, but not outrageously so.
Of course with,
Number of Returns with Positive AGI 139,960,580, the 50th percentile break point is $33,048 means that at least half of the wage earners owe 1.4 times their annual salary, someone at minimum wage ($7.25 * 2000 = $14,500, 46455.15/ 14,500 = 3.2) owes 3.2 times their annual salary, while still paying 15% Medicare taxes and 15% social security! With the top 1% of taxpayers already paying 38% of all the income taxes where is all of this money supposed to come from? $67,280 is the 25th percentile point, That's middle-class in most places.

The way the US dollar is going, you won't be able to afford "cheap" cars from China anyway. Yeah Bernanke harps on about how good a weak dollar is for exports. The US has always consumed more than it produces and the reality of the situation is that even Chinese crap is becoming expensive.

Also, does the ratio of women employed in IT reflect the ratio of women in the sample population? Why on earth would you expect a 50/50 work force in IT, if the population (for sake of argument) is 35/65?

There's more women in the general population than men:
http://www.geohive.com/earth/pop_gender.aspx
but
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/censr-20.pdf
shows that there's more men at younger ages, such as the ages of college-bound young adults.

However, women are now the majority of people going into college in America. They simply aren't going into IT or engineering fields.

If you could get past all the walls and filters and barriers that inhibit clear communication, how does the percentage of women who want to go into IT compare to the percentage of women who ARE in IT?

What I'd like to see is some surveys of women in IT measuring their satisfaction with the career, surveys to determine how many women have left IT, and surveys to see if women who are/were in IT encourage or discourage other women to go into that field. Perhaps you'll find that they've been warning each other away from it. Even among men, I've heard of lots of older men warning their sons to stay away from engineering as a career.

Couple this with that fact that there are far too many loopholes for the upper class and this resentment is not hard to understand.

All the more reason I believe Obama is completely misguided. Raising the taxes on all families making 250k+ does not close these loopholes which are utilized only exclusively by the uberrich. That means the top 1% get off scot-free with their 15% capital gains tax rate and the "upper-middle to wealthy" working class segment is left holding the bill. And that segment just happens to be squarely where practically all small businesses fall. I've far less of an issue with plugging holes than I do indiscriminately raising taxes with a bar set way too low.

I also fail to see how raising taxes on the upper classes would affect millions of Americans

Well, by the numbers: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032006/hhinc/new05_000.htm The top 5% is 166k+. I don't know the exact number for 250k+, but clearly it's somewhere between 1 and 5% (because we know the top 1% make like ~380k). Even at 1% of the US populace, you're looking at 3 million people. If you use a more realistic 2-3%, you're looking at 6 to 9 million people.

As someone that makes a fair amount of money I can assure you that I can afford a couple thousand extra a year in taxes without affecting my lifestyle one bit as opposed to friends of mine where a few hundred extra a year would break them.

My main beef come from people labelling people in this segment as "billionaires" when they have far more in common with the middle class than they do the private jet CEOs. My second beef comes from the fact that the tax as proposed will primarily impact small business, which I do believe will hurt the economy. But I agree with you in that the people could absorb a tax hike without severe lifestyle changes. It's the way the debate is framed that cheeses me off. Even Obama himself says things along the lines of "oh, they can pay a bit more for their jets". I guarantee you most (if not all) families making ~250k a year do not have their own jets. They're still paying mortgages, student loans, working a 9 to 5 job in a cube somewhere.

The US census bureau projects March next year to be the time when world population hits 7 billion.