I haven't heard of paytrust before, but is it really safe to have a third party looking at your bills?
Depends on what you are worried about. There's nothing in any of the bills I send to Paytrust that would bother me if it became public knowledge. If someone wants to alert Al Gore because I used too much electricity last month, I'd love the opportunity to laugh and slam my door in his face.
I pay my credit card with a direct transfer (my checking account and credit card are at same bank), so they don't get that statement. The cool thing about Paytrust is that you can send ANY bill to them, including ones that don't offer automatic payment. And if you want to change the account that is used to pay the bill, you only have to make a change in one place.
Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.
I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.
So basically, TFS says that wikipedia edits are made to a relevant article prior to an event, and therefore, these wikipedia articles were caused by the event.
The tip-off seems to be that the same people were editing both the Presidental and (eventual) Vice-Presidential candidate pages. The same pattern was observed with Obama/Biden.
You've missed the point that in no way was it her or her office's responsibility or duty to fire this guy. She strong-armed the guy's boss into firing him. It wasn't something she should have even been involved with. She overstepped her bounds and used her political office to gain revenge for a family member.
Point of clarification: As far as I can tell, Wooten (the state trooper) is still on the force. He was suspended for cause for 10 days, reduced to 5 days after a grievance was filed by the union.
f all defenses, I think the "I had no knowledge of what my underlings were up to" is the sleaziest. Are we to believe that overzealous staffers took on this cause without any direction from Palin? Really?
I agree, and she should take responsibility for those that worked for her. It will be interesting to see if she steps up and does so when the investigation is complete. Hopefully, it will be over before the election, but I suspect her opponents will take the opportunity to drag it out.
It is true that this state trooper is no saint, but getting him fired was an abuse of power.
Actually, she didn't get the trooper fired. She fired the head of the state patrol, and his claim is she did so because he wouldn't fire the state trooper in question. As far as I can determine, the trooper is still on the force.
It's a bit hard to campaign as fighting corruption when you are, in fact, corrupt.
That's true. But, it will be interesting to see what other doors this particular issue opens.
The stepson asked to be tasered, to feel what it was like. The moose issue is just stupid, and obviously an attempt to pin something on the guy. The beer thing is not substantiated, and the alleged threat is only substantiated by Palin's friends and family. Come on, you can do better than that, can't you?
I'm relying on the state trooper's investigation, and if they found enough evidence to cite and suspend him for these offenses, I don't need anything "better than that".
My only question is if they were sufficiently convinced of the threat to cite him for it, why was he only suspended and not fired? There should be zero tolerance for that.
[A state trooper investigation] found four instances in which Wooten violated policy, broke the law, or both:
- Wooten used a Taser on his stepson
- He shot a moose without a permit, which is illegal. At the time he was married to McCann, who has a permit but never intended to shoot it herself.
- He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
- He told others that his father-in-law - Palin's father, Chuck Heath - would "eat a f'ing lead bullet" if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
Wooten's 10-day suspension was reduced to five after his union filed a grievance.
Your defense of this woman comes across as a bit desperate.
It looks like it was published in the last hour or so. It also itemizes the results of the internal investigation against the state trooper.
Sorry, this story is already getting amazing traction.
I'm not surprised. Both sides are eager to dig up dirt on each other, and this is about the only thing that they have been able to find on Palin. She has made a lot of enemies (in Alaska) from both parties, so it was inevitable.
She tried to get a state trooper fired for divorcing her sister and after that failed, fired his boss for not firing him.
True, she has been accused of this. But so far, the only people implicated in trying to get this state trooper fired are members of her family and staffers in her office, without her knowledge. The only documentation of any action by her pre-dates when she was elected governor.
I don't think it's going to get traction, because the state trooper isn't exactly a sympathetic figure. He was suspended for using a stun-gun on his 10-year-old stepson, and is alleged to have threatened Palin's father (among other things).
I don't mean to start a flame war here (ok maybe just a little) but seriously, how can anyone take a candidate seriously when they shamelessly pander to the stupid lobby?
Before the flamewar starts, maybe someone should read the article that Wired links to. In response to the controversy that followed her comments, she said:
I'm no advocate of creationism, either. But, I question people who insist that it is a subject that must not be discussed. Germany bans certain subjects (and to avoid invoking Godwin's law, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader), but all it seems to do is suppress open debate about it.
And as long as they're building a wire grid across the entire damned state there's no reason why we can't have some taxpayer-owned or power company owned fiber optic cable up on that tower too.
Maybe they wouldn't need to string a separate cable:
After Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act, blacks flocked toward and racists away from the Democratic party, and since then, the Republican party has unquestionably been the more conservative of the two.
Alveda King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., remembers it differently.
My grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther
King, Sr., or "Daddy King", was a
Republican and father of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. who was a Republican.
Daddy King influenced a reported
100,000 black voters to cast
previously Republican votes for
Senator Kennedy even though
Kennedy had voted against the 1957
Civil Rights Law. Mrs. King had
appealed to Kennedy and Nixon
to help her husband, and Nixon
who had voted for the 1957 Civil
Rights Law did
not respond. At
the urging of his
advisors, Kennedy
made a politically
calculated phone
call to Mrs. King,
who was pregnant
at the time,
bringing the attention of the nation
to Dr. King's plight.
Moved by Mrs. King's gratitude for
Senator Kennedy's intervention,
Daddy King was very grateful to
Senator Kennedy for his assistance
in rescuing Dr. King, Jr. from a life
threatening jail encounter. This
experience led to a black exodus
from the Republican Party.
Thus, this one simple act of gratitude
caused black America to quickly
forget that the Republican Party
was birthed in America as the antislavery
party to end the scourge of
slavery and combat the terror of
racism and segregation. They quickly
forgot that the Democratic Party was
the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Banished from memory was the fact
that the Democratic Party fought to
keep blacks in slavery and in 1894
overturned the civil rights laws of
the 1860's that had been passed by
Republicans, after the Republicans
also amended the Constitution to
grant blacks freedom, citizenship and
the right to vote.
Forgotten was the fact that it was
the Republicans who started the
HBCU's and the NAACP to stop the
Democrats from lynching blacks. Into
the dust bin of history was tossed the
fact that it was the Republicans led by
Republican Senator Everett Dirksen
who pushed to pass the civil rights
laws in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and
1968.
Removed from memory are the facts
that it was Republican President
Dwight Eisenhower who sent
troops to Arkansas to desegregate
schools, established the Civil rights
commission in 1958, and appointed
Chief Justice Early Warren to the U.S.
Supreme Court which resulted in the
1954 Brown v. Board of Education
decision ending school segregation.
Meanwhile Democrats in Congress
were still fighting to prevent the
passage of new civil rights laws that
would overturn those discriminatory
Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that
had been enacted by Democrats in
the South. There would have been no
law for President Lyndon Johnson to
sign in 1964 had it not been for the
Republicans breaking the Democrats'
filibuster of the law and pushing
to have that landmark legislation
enacted.
No one batted an eye when President
Kennedy opposed the 1963 March
on Washington by Dr. King. Hardly
a ripple of protest was uttered when
President Kennedy, through his
brother Attorney General Robert
Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped
and investigated on suspicion of
being a Communist.
Little attention was paid to the
fact that it was a Democrat, Public
Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull"
Conner, who in 1963 turned dogs
and fire hoses on Dr. King and
other civil rights protestors. No
one noted that it was a Democrat,
Georgia Governor Lester Maddox,
who waved ax handles to stop blacks
from patronizing his restaurant.
Nor was heed paid to the fact that it
was a Democrat, Alabama Governor
George Wallace, who stood in front
of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963
and thundered: "Segregation now,
segregation tomorrow, segregation
forever." None of those racist
Democrats became Republicans.
Theres a good pile of evidence that this Texas wind thing is one giant con so that Oil man Mr. Pickens can use newly created government power of eminent domain to snatch up land and sell his water pet project under the radar.
I wouldn't be surprised. But, even without Pickens' wind (and water?) project, the existing wind turbines in West Texas are having difficulty delivering their full potential to where it is needed.
Anyone who thinks someone who was part of the 80's raiders and swift boating can actually do something without a hidden con is a fucking idiot.
There's no need for a partisan attitude -- hidden agendas are bipartisan pursuits. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who despite her efforts to save the planet by blocking repeal of offshore drilling bans, is apparently under the impression that natural gas isn't a fossil fuel. Maybe she is influenced by her investment of 100-250K in Clean Energy Fuels Corp, a company run by Pickens that markets compressed natural gas and liquefied natural gas as a fuel for motor vehicles.
Your post is analogous to saying that individual states could each build their own highway system within their own borders.
States do build their own highway systems within their own borders. For that matter, even the "interstate" highways are actually built by the states, albeit with federal funding.
Of course, it is necessary to coordinate so that a highway doesn't end at the state border and go no further. States wishing to share power across their borders would have to do something similar.
In the 1950s the government set about a huge project to link America's cities and states via high speed road links. The investment has paid off well, and a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely.
Apple has in fact severely limited bluetooth on the iPhone, and that includes even specific profiles for external devices. As far as i know the headset is the ONLY thing that works with it.
Handsfree Bluetooth devices work with the iPhone. Mine pairs with my car's stereo system.
However, that's not much different than a headset.
But, we should be able to verify it ourselves. Download the Excel workbook and take a look at the worksheet named "Table0". There, you can see the average income (including capital gains) for the top 0.1% is $3.7M. Multiply that by the number of families (133,325) and you get a total of $495B. In the same table, the total number of families is 148M. Dividing 495B by 74M (1/2 of 148M) yields an average income per family for the bottom 50% that must be less than $6,672, if the statement in question were correct.
Correction: the total is $495T. However, the average of $6,672 is correct.
Actually I did. Just how stupid are you? Try reading. it. again.
The link is there now. It wasn't when I responded to your posting earlier. Why? I don't know. My account is configured to insert the domain name after linked text (to avoid the URL trolls), and it wasn't there when I pasted your quote into my reply.
But, I went to look at your link. To be clear, WSWS.org is the World Socialist Web Site. I prefer to avoid citation of clearly partisan sources, but I read through the article and found the assertion you quoted:
The top.1% of Americans earned almost as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.
Based on other data I've seen, something didn't add up. So, I went to look at the actual report. I was only able to find the version dated through 2002, but the home page of one of the authors has the Excel data, updated through 2006.
I wasn't able to find the statement in question in the report. I also wasn't able to find the NY Times article that the WSWS article cites. So, I don't know the source for the statement.
But, we should be able to verify it ourselves. Download the Excel workbook and take a look at the worksheet named "Table0". There, you can see the average income (including capital gains) for the top 0.1% is $3.7M. Multiply that by the number of families (133,325) and you get a total of $495B. In the same table, the total number of families is 148M. Dividing 495B by 74M (1/2 of 148M) yields an average income per family for the bottom 50% that must be less than $6,672, if the statement in question were correct.
The workbook doesn't contain information by percentile, for less than 90%. But, this graph was derived from Table A-3: Selected Measures of Household Income Dispersion: 1967 to 2003. The table on the same page shows the same data, and in 2003, the average income of the lowest quintile is $10,536 -- substantially higher than the implied average of $6,672 for the lowest 50% that is claimed above.
I'm not claiming that the report is in error, although there is certainly somecontrovery about it. However, it appears that someone's interpretation doesn't meet the smell test. You might want to take some time reading the entire report and corroborate it against other sources.
The graph from Wikipedia (derived from a US Census report) appears to support part of your claim: the gap between the 95th percentile and the 10th percentile has certainly gotten wider since 1967. The gap between the 10th and 50th percentiles also has gotten wider, although to a lesser extent. However, the gap has leveled off or even declined slightly since 1999 -- ironically since Bush 43 took office.
Nice how you didn't mention the income disparity - it's at the highest rate since just before the great depression - along with tax rates. The top.1% of Americans earned almost as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.
[Citation needed]
And focusing only on income taxes is a classic dodge that ignores the taxes that make a significant percentage of the middle classes tax burden.
I didn't dodge anything, other than to challenge your reading comprehension skills. So, I'll repeat it again, slowly, in bold:
Even if you include all federal taxes, the top 20% paid 68.7% of all taxes in 2005, and the top 10% paid 54.7%.
"All federal taxes" include individual income taxes, social insurance taxes, individual share of corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It doesn't include state and local taxes, but the President doesn't have much control over those.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't heard of paytrust before, but is it really safe to have a third party looking at your bills?
Depends on what you are worried about. There's nothing in any of the bills I send to Paytrust that would bother me if it became public knowledge. If someone wants to alert Al Gore because I used too much electricity last month, I'd love the opportunity to laugh and slam my door in his face.
I pay my credit card with a direct transfer (my checking account and credit card are at same bank), so they don't get that statement. The cool thing about Paytrust is that you can send ANY bill to them, including ones that don't offer automatic payment. And if you want to change the account that is used to pay the bill, you only have to make a change in one place.
http://www.paytrust.com/
Most of my bills are transmitted electronically. The rest are mailed to Paytrust's P.O. box, and they post the scanned PDF for my review.
I set the payment rules via their website: pay full amount, pay full amount up to [limit], pay specified amount. Or I can just wait for the notification in my email and pay it myself with a few bill clicks.
So basically, TFS says that wikipedia edits are made to a relevant article prior to an event, and therefore, these wikipedia articles were caused by the event.
The tip-off seems to be that the same people were editing both the Presidental and (eventual) Vice-Presidential candidate pages. The same pattern was observed with Obama/Biden.
You've missed the point that in no way was it her or her office's responsibility or duty to fire this guy. She strong-armed the guy's boss into firing him. It wasn't something she should have even been involved with. She overstepped her bounds and used her political office to gain revenge for a family member.
Point of clarification: As far as I can tell, Wooten (the state trooper) is still on the force. He was suspended for cause for 10 days, reduced to 5 days after a grievance was filed by the union.
http://www.adn.com/news/politics/story/510080.html
Reading between the lines, it appears that Palin's husband was responsible for a lot of the pressure.
f all defenses, I think the "I had no knowledge of what my underlings were up to" is the sleaziest. Are we to believe that overzealous staffers took on this cause without any direction from Palin? Really?
I agree, and she should take responsibility for those that worked for her. It will be interesting to see if she steps up and does so when the investigation is complete. Hopefully, it will be over before the election, but I suspect her opponents will take the opportunity to drag it out.
It is true that this state trooper is no saint, but getting him fired was an abuse of power.
Actually, she didn't get the trooper fired. She fired the head of the state patrol, and his claim is she did so because he wouldn't fire the state trooper in question. As far as I can determine, the trooper is still on the force.
It's a bit hard to campaign as fighting corruption when you are, in fact, corrupt.
That's true. But, it will be interesting to see what other doors this particular issue opens.
The stepson asked to be tasered, to feel what it was like. The moose issue is just stupid, and obviously an attempt to pin something on the guy. The beer thing is not substantiated, and the alleged threat is only substantiated by Palin's friends and family. Come on, you can do better than that, can't you?
I'm relying on the state trooper's investigation, and if they found enough evidence to cite and suspend him for these offenses, I don't need anything "better than that".
My only question is if they were sufficiently convinced of the threat to cite him for it, why was he only suspended and not fired? There should be zero tolerance for that.
Far from being fiscally conservative, she raised the Alaska budget.
Yes, to a record $6.6B. But, at the same time, vetoed $231M.
She is rabidly anti-evolution.
This has already been discussed elsewhere in this article's comments. Such a claim will require more corroboration than you have offered.
She supports Ted Stevens.
That would explain why she cancelled his infamous Bridge to Nowhere.
She has no experience.
Yes, she is thin on experience. But, she has more experience in an executive position than both of her opponents, combined.
Where is your proof this guy was a thug? So far, the only people calling him that are people with an obvious motive for slandering him.
Maybe if you were to read the article that you pointed me to:
'Troopergate' inquiry lurks
[A state trooper investigation] found four instances in which Wooten violated policy, broke the law, or both:
- Wooten used a Taser on his stepson
- He shot a moose without a permit, which is illegal. At the time he was married to McCann, who has a permit but never intended to shoot it herself.
- He drank beer in his patrol car on one occasion.
- He told others that his father-in-law - Palin's father, Chuck Heath - would "eat a f'ing lead bullet" if he helped his daughter get an attorney for the divorce.
Wooten's 10-day suspension was reduced to five after his union filed a grievance.
Your defense of this woman comes across as a bit desperate.
Not nearly as desperate as your attack.
The article you link to is over a month old. Here is a list of more recent stories from the Anchorage Daily News:
Thank you, it was the first one I found with a reasonable summary. A better one is:
http://www.adn.com/news/politics/story/510080.html
It looks like it was published in the last hour or so. It also itemizes the results of the internal investigation against the state trooper.
Sorry, this story is already getting amazing traction.
I'm not surprised. Both sides are eager to dig up dirt on each other, and this is about the only thing that they have been able to find on Palin. She has made a lot of enemies (in Alaska) from both parties, so it was inevitable.
Perhaps Biden should look at implants.
He already has. The open question is where they got them from. :-)
She tried to get a state trooper fired for divorcing her sister and after that failed, fired his boss for not firing him.
True, she has been accused of this. But so far, the only people implicated in trying to get this state trooper fired are members of her family and staffers in her office, without her knowledge. The only documentation of any action by her pre-dates when she was elected governor.
I don't think it's going to get traction, because the state trooper isn't exactly a sympathetic figure. He was suspended for using a stun-gun on his 10-year-old stepson, and is alleged to have threatened Palin's father (among other things).
Story here, with links to background material: http://www.adn.com/politics/story/468174.html
I don't mean to start a flame war here (ok maybe just a little) but seriously, how can anyone take a candidate seriously when they shamelessly pander to the stupid lobby?
Before the flamewar starts, maybe someone should read the article that Wired links to. In response to the controversy that followed her comments, she said:
"I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."
I'm no advocate of creationism, either. But, I question people who insist that it is a subject that must not be discussed. Germany bans certain subjects (and to avoid invoking Godwin's law, I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader), but all it seems to do is suppress open debate about it.
However, I haven't been able to find anyone actually manufacturing or using this composite cable.
I didn't try the right combination of search terms:
Optical fiber composite overhead ground wire
Development of High-Performance Composite Fiber-Optic Overhead Ground Wire
And as long as they're building a wire grid across the entire damned state there's no reason why we can't have some taxpayer-owned or power company owned fiber optic cable up on that tower too.
Maybe they wouldn't need to string a separate cable:
US Patent 6343172 - Composite fiber optic/coaxial electrical cables
However, I haven't been able to find anyone actually manufacturing or using this composite cable.
After Johnson, a Democrat, signed the Civil Rights Act, blacks flocked toward and racists away from the Democratic party, and since then, the Republican party has unquestionably been the more conservative of the two.
Alveda King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr., remembers it differently.
http://www.trustedpartner.com/docs/library/000143/Alveda%20King%20article.pdf
My grandfather, Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr., or "Daddy King", was a Republican and father of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who was a Republican.
Daddy King influenced a reported 100,000 black voters to cast previously Republican votes for Senator Kennedy even though Kennedy had voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Law. Mrs. King had appealed to Kennedy and Nixon to help her husband, and Nixon who had voted for the 1957 Civil Rights Law did not respond. At the urging of his advisors, Kennedy made a politically calculated phone call to Mrs. King, who was pregnant at the time, bringing the attention of the nation to Dr. King's plight.
Moved by Mrs. King's gratitude for Senator Kennedy's intervention, Daddy King was very grateful to Senator Kennedy for his assistance in rescuing Dr. King, Jr. from a life threatening jail encounter. This experience led to a black exodus from the Republican Party.
Thus, this one simple act of gratitude caused black America to quickly forget that the Republican Party was birthed in America as the antislavery party to end the scourge of slavery and combat the terror of racism and segregation. They quickly forgot that the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan.
Banished from memory was the fact that the Democratic Party fought to keep blacks in slavery and in 1894 overturned the civil rights laws of the 1860's that had been passed by Republicans, after the Republicans also amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom, citizenship and the right to vote.
Forgotten was the fact that it was the Republicans who started the HBCU's and the NAACP to stop the Democrats from lynching blacks. Into the dust bin of history was tossed the fact that it was the Republicans led by Republican Senator Everett Dirksen who pushed to pass the civil rights laws in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968.
Removed from memory are the facts that it was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools, established the Civil rights commission in 1958, and appointed Chief Justice Early Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation.
Meanwhile Democrats in Congress were still fighting to prevent the passage of new civil rights laws that would overturn those discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that had been enacted by Democrats in the South. There would have been no law for President Lyndon Johnson to sign in 1964 had it not been for the Republicans breaking the Democrats' filibuster of the law and pushing to have that landmark legislation enacted.
No one batted an eye when President Kennedy opposed the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King. Hardly a ripple of protest was uttered when President Kennedy, through his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated on suspicion of being a Communist.
Little attention was paid to the fact that it was a Democrat, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Conner, who in 1963 turned dogs and fire hoses on Dr. King and other civil rights protestors. No one noted that it was a Democrat, Georgia Governor Lester Maddox, who waved ax handles to stop blacks from patronizing his restaurant. Nor was heed paid to the fact that it was a Democrat, Alabama Governor George Wallace, who stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." None of those racist Democrats became Republicans.
Theres a good pile of evidence that this Texas wind thing is one giant con so that Oil man Mr. Pickens can use newly created government power of eminent domain to snatch up land and sell his water pet project under the radar.
I wouldn't be surprised. But, even without Pickens' wind (and water?) project, the existing wind turbines in West Texas are having difficulty delivering their full potential to where it is needed.
Anyone who thinks someone who was part of the 80's raiders and swift boating can actually do something without a hidden con is a fucking idiot.
There's no need for a partisan attitude -- hidden agendas are bipartisan pursuits. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who despite her efforts to save the planet by blocking repeal of offshore drilling bans, is apparently under the impression that natural gas isn't a fossil fuel. Maybe she is influenced by her investment of 100-250K in Clean Energy Fuels Corp, a company run by Pickens that markets compressed natural gas and liquefied natural gas as a fuel for motor vehicles.
Your post is analogous to saying that individual states could each build their own highway system within their own borders.
States do build their own highway systems within their own borders. For that matter, even the "interstate" highways are actually built by the states, albeit with federal funding.
Of course, it is necessary to coordinate so that a highway doesn't end at the state border and go no further. States wishing to share power across their borders would have to do something similar.
In the 1950s the government set about a huge project to link America's cities and states via high speed road links. The investment has paid off well, and a similar project on our power infrastructure (especially if they could build a fibre network alongside) would pay off just as handsomely.
Or the states could step up and do it themselves:
Texas Approves a $4.93 Billion Wind-Power (Transmission) Project
I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon!
Apple has in fact severely limited bluetooth on the iPhone, and that includes even specific profiles for external devices. As far as i know the headset is the ONLY thing that works with it.
Handsfree Bluetooth devices work with the iPhone. Mine pairs with my car's stereo system.
However, that's not much different than a headset.
But, we should be able to verify it ourselves. Download the Excel workbook and take a look at the worksheet named "Table0". There, you can see the average income (including capital gains) for the top 0.1% is $3.7M. Multiply that by the number of families (133,325) and you get a total of $495B. In the same table, the total number of families is 148M. Dividing 495B by 74M (1/2 of 148M) yields an average income per family for the bottom 50% that must be less than $6,672, if the statement in question were correct.
Correction: the total is $495T. However, the average of $6,672 is correct.
Actually I did. Just how stupid are you? Try reading. it. again.
The link is there now. It wasn't when I responded to your posting earlier. Why? I don't know. My account is configured to insert the domain name after linked text (to avoid the URL trolls), and it wasn't there when I pasted your quote into my reply.
But, I went to look at your link. To be clear, WSWS.org is the World Socialist Web Site. I prefer to avoid citation of clearly partisan sources, but I read through the article and found the assertion you quoted:
The top .1% of Americans earned almost as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.
Based on other data I've seen, something didn't add up. So, I went to look at the actual report. I was only able to find the version dated through 2002, but the home page of one of the authors has the Excel data, updated through 2006. I wasn't able to find the statement in question in the report. I also wasn't able to find the NY Times article that the WSWS article cites. So, I don't know the source for the statement.
But, we should be able to verify it ourselves. Download the Excel workbook and take a look at the worksheet named "Table0". There, you can see the average income (including capital gains) for the top 0.1% is $3.7M. Multiply that by the number of families (133,325) and you get a total of $495B. In the same table, the total number of families is 148M. Dividing 495B by 74M (1/2 of 148M) yields an average income per family for the bottom 50% that must be less than $6,672, if the statement in question were correct.
The workbook doesn't contain information by percentile, for less than 90%. But, this graph was derived from Table A-3: Selected Measures of Household Income Dispersion: 1967 to 2003. The table on the same page shows the same data, and in 2003, the average income of the lowest quintile is $10,536 -- substantially higher than the implied average of $6,672 for the lowest 50% that is claimed above.
I'm not claiming that the report is in error, although there is certainly some controvery about it. However, it appears that someone's interpretation doesn't meet the smell test. You might want to take some time reading the entire report and corroborate it against other sources.
The graph from Wikipedia (derived from a US Census report) appears to support part of your claim: the gap between the 95th percentile and the 10th percentile has certainly gotten wider since 1967. The gap between the 10th and 50th percentiles also has gotten wider, although to a lesser extent. However, the gap has leveled off or even declined slightly since 1999 -- ironically since Bush 43 took office.
I did, dumbass.
You made an unsourced statement without any attribution. Let me give you a hint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_needed.
September apparently arrived early this year.
Nice how you didn't mention the income disparity - it's at the highest rate since just before the great depression - along with tax rates. The top .1% of Americans earned almost as much as the bottom 150 million Americans.
[Citation needed]
And focusing only on income taxes is a classic dodge that ignores the taxes that make a significant percentage of the middle classes tax burden.
I didn't dodge anything, other than to challenge your reading comprehension skills. So, I'll repeat it again, slowly, in bold:
Even if you include all federal taxes, the top 20% paid 68.7% of all taxes in 2005, and the top 10% paid 54.7%.
"All federal taxes" include individual income taxes, social insurance taxes, individual share of corporate income taxes, and excise taxes. It doesn't include state and local taxes, but the President doesn't have much control over those.
When it fact it's a nice place with plenty of trees and forests.
I worked in Princeton for 8 months, commuting through Newark airport every weekend.
Driving south on 95, I saw the worst of NJ. But once you get past Linden and Elizabeth, it's an entirely different state.
If NJ could cede Newark/Jersey City to NYC, and Camden/Trenton to Philadelphia (along with the corrupt state government), it would be a nice place.