So you are for cutting regulation then? I'm currently working on an aviation product. The only way for me to get it to market is to go through FAA certification. That certification process is there to make sure the software and hardware are flight worthy given the potential loss of human lift, but if you look at the requirements, it's much more of a "pay us enough money to certify your stuff and we'll let you into the club" type regulation. The requirements do not, in themselves, make better software,
I just saw a speech by the COO of iRobot where he listed all the certifications his company has received over the last 10 years so they can be a federal contractor. He calculated the cost to be over $40M and stated quite plainly "not one penny of that went to a better product, a cheaper product, or a more efficient process - it was merely the cost of access to the federal government".
You want to help out workers? Cut regulatory requirements. The "CEOs are making too much money" tripe isn't typical of most small businesses. You are complaining about the actions of the fortune 500 companies who have spent a lot of money to create regulatory hurdles for the little guys. Cut regulatory requirements, and the big fish who are misbehaving will suddenly have competition from those who are willing to accept a leaner CEO compensation.
I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs
Absolutely. If you want this, lobby your city council, get involved, go to meetings, get elected to the board if you have to. The whole point is that you are going to have to build grassroots support outside of the walled garden that is/. if you want to see this happen. There are a number of cities and municipalities that have done this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Cities_with_municipal_wi-fi, so you'll have plenty of lessons learned to work from.
In short, this doesn't need to be a federal government thing, it just needs to be done in the local community. The feds only have to get involved in fixing the long-haul problems in the network related to peering, etc.
You shouldn't operate machinery under effects of alcohol, either.
Alcohol is detectable when there is enough to impair you. Marijuana on the other hand "hangs around in your system for as long as 24 hours after smoking. The lingering effects mean you're impaired for several hours after the high wears off." http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/marijuana-use-and-its-effects. There is a demonstrable difference in the duration and severity of each of these substances. Marijuana has the longest duration of the three, and the abilities that are compromised are mostly cognitive http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/job185drugs/cannabis.htm.
While all three of these substances are comparable in terms of causal use, marijuana very clearly stands out from the other two in terms of effects and duration. I don't think it's a strong comparison.
Your questions forced me to look up info on NTLM and it turns out my earlier post was incorrect. LM is encoded in 7 byte chunks, not 8 byte. NTLM was the fix to the horrible LM hash that I was remember earlier. Mea culpa. LM was still used in XP to maintain backwards compatibility (thus completely circumventing the NTLM hashes of the same password). NTLM is still in use today, although it also suffers from known vulnerabilities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLM
So the TFA proves that password cracking is exponential in the length of the password, and that GPUs cut down on the rather large constant in front of the exponent. This still does not eliminate the fact that each digit added increases the cracking time exponentially. In other words, use a longer password. Of course, NTLM is a farce since it only hashes 8 byte chunks, so you can't up the cracking time by more than X^8. The moral of the story here is that GPUs are faster than CPUs (for some specialized applications), yet you can still overwhelm them using a longer password. The other moral is that NTLM is an utter failure, but we all knew that.
If anyone really cared enough, they could build a single-purpose circuit to calculate hashes and compare with the hash file. With enough money invested, you could easily beat any GPU by a couple orders of magnitude. That still doesn't make this news worth discussing as the other side can up the ante by adding to the password length again (among many other things already mentioned such as salts).
I wouldn't write off Turing Machines as useless. You're right that it really doesn't help to say that a CA is a UTM just like an I7 processor. You're just as correct in saying that processors technically are not UTMs, they are finite tape TMs with somewhat less power than a UTM. The real importance of TMs in general is that there are problems that cannot be solved, no matter how much time or memory you have. That's a pretty big statement to make, yet there it is, and it's anchored solidly in logical argument. Take that a step further and show the equivalence of Post's Correspondence Problem to the Halting Problem, and now you have a practical, real-world problem (which I have watched many programmers who turned their nose up at theory attempt to solve in one form or another).
My personal belief is that we're Turing Complete. I just don't think we've developed enough knowledge of how the brain works to categorically make that statement.
Yes, but NN's are not equivalent to human brains. They approximate similar patterns, but are in no way the same thing. You can't go from Neural Network is Turing Complete to human brain is a Neural Network, therefore the human brain is Turing Complete. You're about a billion steps from showing equivalence between those two things.
Very insightful. Wish I had mod points for you. The trick, of course, would be to prove that the brain is equivalent to a Turing Machine. It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing. That thought notwithstanding, the fundamental insight behind the Church-Turing Thesis is that there are a countably infinite number of TM configurations, and an uncountably infinite number of languages that could be applied to TM's. Therefore there are languages that TMs will be unable to accept by the pigeonhole principle. It is highly unlikely that the human brain has an uncountably infinite number of configurations, therefore it is likely that there are undecidable "languages" that the human brain cannot accept. In other words, the human brain may be a TM. On the other hand, one could make a counter argument of neuron path length being analogue, thus allowing infinite configurations, but the halting problem seems to be a language that is also undecidable by the human brain - showing that there are undecidable languages for the brain.
Funny, just went through three different manufacturer's PLC instruction sets and none of them listed test and set or any other kind of discernible atomic instruction. Do you have any references you could point me to? I'd be interested to know for sure.
If that's the case, there is no need for mutex or semaphore constructs because those are only needed for parallelism. Parent was stating that he's used both in PLCs. If that's the case, why? Either he has no clue, or you're wrong. I don't really care either way, just addressing the fact that you can't just implement a mutex as a flag or a semaphore as an integer as stated by parent.
Mutexes and semaphores are a bit more than bits and integers. You have to be able to modify them atomically. If you don't design your PLC correctly, you end up with two paths attempting to modify the same bit at the same time. Without atomicity, you can't know which won.
von Neuman is an architecture, the word you are looking for is Imperative languages. Those "other" languages could be functional or logical. If you really want to get down to brass tacks, it comes down to whether you want stateful programming (imperative requires state), or stateless programming (functional and logical programming).
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2164084&cid=36181098 where I explain everything in more detail to include actual GDP and tax revenues. Also, the report was signed off by Democrat members of the committee too and was never changed, retracted, or redacted later during Dem majorities, so it's not as partisan as you might think. The numbers add up and speak for themselves if you're willing to look them up (guess I assumed too much in thinking people would).
Of particular note from the Treasury Department's report on Income Mobility are (taken from the second link above)
There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.
About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within 10 years.
Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of 1 percent — only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period.
The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from 1996 to
2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.
The major gem in this is
More than half (57.4 percent = 100 — 42.6) of the top 1 percent of households in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005
So while you bemoan income inequality, over half of those top 1% earners are dropping out of that group, meaning that others have moved up from below.
Keep up your class warfare. You'll find that this mobility decreases as you fight to take more from the top and give it to the bottom. Instead, try to educate yourself, work hard, save and make wise investments, and you might just find yourself in that top 1% some day instead.
There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed.
I think your Congressional representative would disagree with you there. It's called a tax code and it's full of exemptions that people use to legally reduce their tax burden. We can probably agree that these exemptions shouldn't exist, but to villify "the rich" for minimizing their losses legally is ludicrous. Case in point, I bet you probably made a charitable donation or two last tax year and claimed in on your return, or perhaps you deducted mortgage interest - either way, that means you're just part of the problem you hate. The tax code is, and always has been, a tool for modifying behavior. The problem is that the law of unintended consequences always bites even the best of intentions in the ass.
First, a link to a congressional committee is hardly a partisan statement. The Joint Economic Committee is a Congressional Committee that is representative of the government at the time and the report had inputs from all members.
Second, the parts of the report I quoted were illustrative of the fact that tax decreases from 70% to 50% would increase, rather than decrease revenue. The amount of tax burden paid by higher income earners was also part of higher revenues. If you doubt that, here are the numbers in 2010 constant dollars using CPI data (sources http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/,ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt). For the rest of this post, everything will be in 2010 constant dollars. The numbers are:
Year GDP($M) %Change Expected_Revenue($M) Actual_Revenue($M) Difference($M)
1981 $7,500.74 0.82%
1982 $7,351.09 -1.01% $1,414.15 $1,387.17 -$26.98
1983 $7,738.36 2.57% $1,422.77 $1,306.57 -$116.21
1984 $8,249.82 3.20% $1,348.36 $1,389.88 $41.52
1985 $8,546.94 1.77% $1,414.47 $1,478.22 $63.75
1986 $8,873.65 1.88% $1,505.94 $1,520.67 $14.73
1987 $9,091.55 1.21% $1,539.12 $1,629.52 $90.40
1988 $9,401.29 1.67% $1,656.81 $1,665.43 $8.62
1989 $9,640.36 1.26% $1,686.34 $1,731.93 $45.60
1990 $9,677.38 0.19% $1,735.25 $1,710.90 -$24.35
The total revenue collected over this period was $13820.29M, but GDP growth only accounts for $13723.20M. In other words, the government collected $97.08M more than if ERTA was not enacted, all other considerations held constant.
Third, you're correct in saying that tax reductions didn't necessarily lead to increased tax revenues, but GDP growth doesn't account for that either. The fact that upper income brackets increased their wealth has a lot do with with the reduction of capital gains tax from 28% to 20% which led to many top earners realizing their capital gains, thus increasing their net income. That behavior is documented (but I didn't keep track of that url, sorry) and would explain both phenomenon. GDP growth alone does not.
Again, this is all in reaction to the assertion that we need to go back to 75% tax rates, not an argument for or against much smaller tax cuts or raises in the present per se. You can do the same analysis with the Clinton's 1993 tax increase and you'll find that the tax revenues grow at a lower rate than the overall GDP, indicating that people who can shelter their money, are doing just that, once more highlighting the argument that increasing taxes reduces revenues in the long run.
Just raise the income tax back to pre-Regan era levels
I would say I'm amazed at the economic illiteracy of/.'ers, but it's not really a surprise given political discourse these days. I'll let the Joint Economic Committee do the talking for me. http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-grwth/reagtxct/reagtxct.htm
During the 1980s ERTA had reduced personal tax rates by about 25 percent, while the Tax Reform Act of 1986 chopped them yet again.
after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase.
The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.
The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to [sic] having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993.
according to the FY 1997 Clinton budget submission, individual income tax revenues as a share of GDP will be lower during the first four years of the Clinton tax increase, which include the effects of the 1990 tax increase, than under the last four years of the Reagan tax changes (FY 1986-89)
Even so, individual income tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989.
We're the lowest taxed generation since WWII. The highest rate now is 35%, and few pay it. The highest tax bracket in the 90s was 39.6. The highest tax bracket under most of Regan was 50%. Under Nixon was 70%. Kenedy was 91%. Eisenhower was also 91%. The rate coming out of WWII was 94%.
Actually, now it is MODELED. Given that we have no direct experience with planets like this, none of the models can be directly verified, and the authors had to invent a new model just to reach their conclusion, I think it is poor scientific practice to say that is it "confirmed" to be habitable. Instead, it is confirmed that there is a possible path by which it could be habitable, but that just doesn't have the same zing to it, so instead we make wild assertions and let the sci-fi geeks salivate over what amounts to a plausible, but completely unproven, explanation for how things work. While we're at it, I have this model for how the universe was created. We have no way to verify it, but it is at least plausible. I guess we should just call it confirmed and shout down anyone who objects as unscientific.
I do think it's worth pointing out that 'computer illiterate' should be no more socially acceptable than 'illiterate'
Except that we don't exactly spend 12 years attempting to teach people how to operate their computer, nor is computer literacy a simple yes/no question - can they read? yes. Can they install multiple applications, manage files, understand file extensions, make shortcuts, delete shortcuts, understand what deleting is and why you can sometimes undelete and sometimes not, etc.? Throw in the types of things that matter for the average net user such as "Can they recognize a phishing attack? Malware? Do they know what a trojan is?" and you're stuck with a continuum in which some people are competent, others are at survival level, and others are hopelessly lost. I'd like to see what a primary education class on "computer literacy" would look like. So far, it's been translated to mean typing at a certain wpm and able to open MS Word without coaching.
I recently moved to a location that is within 1/4 mile of where I work. The cost of housing is so much higher that, counting my gas savings over my previous commute, I'm still losing money on rent over what I paid in gas usage. With the current economy, I'm not going to be able to buy a new car any time soon and expect to drive my truck until it hits 250k (it's halfway there now). The reason I moved was purely a safety/better neighborhood issue. When inner city housing becomes affordable relative to suburban housing, people will make the move and save gas. Until that happens, rail all you want at all those irresponsible people driving big cars, but they're probably saving money over the Prius owner that lives in downtown San Francisco and walks to almost everything they need on a daily basis.
Consequently, a little math:
Consider a car that gets 20mpg on a 15 mile daily one-way commute.
That equates to $0.20 per mile or $6 per day or ~$168/mo.
Rent near work is ~$350/mo more than 15 miles away.
This means that I would either need a car that gets less than 10mpg or gas would have to increase to $8.33 per gallon at 20mpg to make it economically feasible to move downtown. If I bought a Prius instead (assuming 40mpg), the cost of gas has to get up to $16.68 before it's economically feasible. The economic incentive to save gas doesn't really exist when the supply and demand of urban housing is factored in.
P.S. before all the pedants start pointing out cost of driving to the grocery store, etc. due to excessive anti-development activism in this area, I'm actually the same distance from all of those things as I was before. There are no stores in walking or easy biking distance. I still drive 7 miles to get to the main commercial area of town as I did before, so that really isn't a factor. It is also the anti-development fervor that has driven costs up. Go figure.
So is there too much tax money collected or not enough?
Wrong question. Look at the deficit instead. http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/government-receipts-and-expenditures.png. Note the mostly steady increase in expenditures as revenue dropped. Also note the drop in revenue does not correspond with any tax cuts or "spending in the tax code". The problem here is that we are willing to count 1% reductions in the growth of spending as a spending cut when the actual tax revenues have dropped as a result of the financial meltdown. This is what happens when the real world intrudes on politics. They ignore the real world and keep playing games as usual.
Tax increases aren't going to fix a steadily increasing expenditure unless you propose steadily increasing taxes or you have a steadily increasing economy. Since we currently have neither, the answer is to spend less. If you tax more, the economy grows more slowly and that upward trend becomes a horizontal or downward trend instead. If you spend less, the upward expenditure trend become horizontal and everything will be fine eventually. It's the idea that we can grow our way out of a deficit by having higher growth rate that spending increase rate that has failed us here, not tax receipts.
Slashdot Mirror
So you are for cutting regulation then? I'm currently working on an aviation product. The only way for me to get it to market is to go through FAA certification. That certification process is there to make sure the software and hardware are flight worthy given the potential loss of human lift, but if you look at the requirements, it's much more of a "pay us enough money to certify your stuff and we'll let you into the club" type regulation. The requirements do not, in themselves, make better software, I just saw a speech by the COO of iRobot where he listed all the certifications his company has received over the last 10 years so they can be a federal contractor. He calculated the cost to be over $40M and stated quite plainly "not one penny of that went to a better product, a cheaper product, or a more efficient process - it was merely the cost of access to the federal government". You want to help out workers? Cut regulatory requirements. The "CEOs are making too much money" tripe isn't typical of most small businesses. You are complaining about the actions of the fortune 500 companies who have spent a lot of money to create regulatory hurdles for the little guys. Cut regulatory requirements, and the big fish who are misbehaving will suddenly have competition from those who are willing to accept a leaner CEO compensation.
I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs
Absolutely. If you want this, lobby your city council, get involved, go to meetings, get elected to the board if you have to. The whole point is that you are going to have to build grassroots support outside of the walled garden that is /. if you want to see this happen. There are a number of cities and municipalities that have done this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Cities_with_municipal_wi-fi, so you'll have plenty of lessons learned to work from.
In short, this doesn't need to be a federal government thing, it just needs to be done in the local community. The feds only have to get involved in fixing the long-haul problems in the network related to peering, etc.
You shouldn't operate machinery under effects of alcohol, either.
Alcohol is detectable when there is enough to impair you. Marijuana on the other hand "hangs around in your system for as long as 24 hours after smoking. The lingering effects mean you're impaired for several hours after the high wears off." http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/marijuana-use-and-its-effects. There is a demonstrable difference in the duration and severity of each of these substances. Marijuana has the longest duration of the three, and the abilities that are compromised are mostly cognitive http://www.nhtsa.gov/people/injury/research/job185drugs/cannabis.htm.
While all three of these substances are comparable in terms of causal use, marijuana very clearly stands out from the other two in terms of effects and duration. I don't think it's a strong comparison.
Your questions forced me to look up info on NTLM and it turns out my earlier post was incorrect. LM is encoded in 7 byte chunks, not 8 byte. NTLM was the fix to the horrible LM hash that I was remember earlier. Mea culpa. LM was still used in XP to maintain backwards compatibility (thus completely circumventing the NTLM hashes of the same password). NTLM is still in use today, although it also suffers from known vulnerabilities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTLM
There's only so much entropy a human brain can memorize easily
Check out this site on entropy. It provides some very interesting insights on ways to encode entropy memorably. http://www.leemon.com/crypto/MakePass.html
So the TFA proves that password cracking is exponential in the length of the password, and that GPUs cut down on the rather large constant in front of the exponent. This still does not eliminate the fact that each digit added increases the cracking time exponentially. In other words, use a longer password. Of course, NTLM is a farce since it only hashes 8 byte chunks, so you can't up the cracking time by more than X^8. The moral of the story here is that GPUs are faster than CPUs (for some specialized applications), yet you can still overwhelm them using a longer password. The other moral is that NTLM is an utter failure, but we all knew that.
If anyone really cared enough, they could build a single-purpose circuit to calculate hashes and compare with the hash file. With enough money invested, you could easily beat any GPU by a couple orders of magnitude. That still doesn't make this news worth discussing as the other side can up the ante by adding to the password length again (among many other things already mentioned such as salts).
I wouldn't write off Turing Machines as useless. You're right that it really doesn't help to say that a CA is a UTM just like an I7 processor. You're just as correct in saying that processors technically are not UTMs, they are finite tape TMs with somewhat less power than a UTM. The real importance of TMs in general is that there are problems that cannot be solved, no matter how much time or memory you have. That's a pretty big statement to make, yet there it is, and it's anchored solidly in logical argument. Take that a step further and show the equivalence of Post's Correspondence Problem to the Halting Problem, and now you have a practical, real-world problem (which I have watched many programmers who turned their nose up at theory attempt to solve in one form or another).
My personal belief is that we're Turing Complete. I just don't think we've developed enough knowledge of how the brain works to categorically make that statement.
Yes, but NN's are not equivalent to human brains. They approximate similar patterns, but are in no way the same thing. You can't go from Neural Network is Turing Complete to human brain is a Neural Network, therefore the human brain is Turing Complete. You're about a billion steps from showing equivalence between those two things.
Very insightful. Wish I had mod points for you. The trick, of course, would be to prove that the brain is equivalent to a Turing Machine. It's not been done yet, and we don't understand enough to even think about such a thing. That thought notwithstanding, the fundamental insight behind the Church-Turing Thesis is that there are a countably infinite number of TM configurations, and an uncountably infinite number of languages that could be applied to TM's. Therefore there are languages that TMs will be unable to accept by the pigeonhole principle. It is highly unlikely that the human brain has an uncountably infinite number of configurations, therefore it is likely that there are undecidable "languages" that the human brain cannot accept. In other words, the human brain may be a TM. On the other hand, one could make a counter argument of neuron path length being analogue, thus allowing infinite configurations, but the halting problem seems to be a language that is also undecidable by the human brain - showing that there are undecidable languages for the brain.
Funny, just went through three different manufacturer's PLC instruction sets and none of them listed test and set or any other kind of discernible atomic instruction. Do you have any references you could point me to? I'd be interested to know for sure.
If that's the case, there is no need for mutex or semaphore constructs because those are only needed for parallelism. Parent was stating that he's used both in PLCs. If that's the case, why? Either he has no clue, or you're wrong. I don't really care either way, just addressing the fact that you can't just implement a mutex as a flag or a semaphore as an integer as stated by parent.
Mutexes and semaphores are a bit more than bits and integers. You have to be able to modify them atomically. If you don't design your PLC correctly, you end up with two paths attempting to modify the same bit at the same time. Without atomicity, you can't know which won.
von Neuman is an architecture, the word you are looking for is Imperative languages. Those "other" languages could be functional or logical. If you really want to get down to brass tacks, it comes down to whether you want stateful programming (imperative requires state), or stateless programming (functional and logical programming).
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2164084&cid=36181098 where I explain everything in more detail to include actual GDP and tax revenues. Also, the report was signed off by Democrat members of the committee too and was never changed, retracted, or redacted later during Dem majorities, so it's not as partisan as you might think. The numbers add up and speak for themselves if you're willing to look them up (guess I assumed too much in thinking people would).
Your rant would make perfect sense if all rich people are rich for life and all poor people are poor for life. Fortunately for us, that's not the case in America as opposed to some other countries. Do some reading http://www.jstor.org/stable/2646760, http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/income_mobility_in_the_united_states/.
Of particular note from the Treasury Department's report on Income Mobility are (taken from the second link above)
There was considerable income mobility of individuals in the U.S. economy during the 1996 through 2005 period with roughly half of taxpayers who began in the bottom quintile moving up to a higher income group within 10 years.
About 55 percent of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile within 10 years.
Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996 — the top 1/100 of 1 percent — only 25 percent remained in this group in 2005. Moreover, the median real income of these taxpayers declined over this period.
The degree of mobility among income groups is unchanged from the prior decade (1987 through 1996).
Economic growth resulted in rising incomes for most taxpayers over the period from 1996 to 2005. Median incomes of all taxpayers increased by 24 percent after adjusting for inflation. The real incomes of two-thirds of all taxpayers increased over this period. In addition, the median incomes of those initially in the lower income groups increased more than the median incomes of those initially in the higher income groups.
The major gem in this is
More than half (57.4 percent = 100 — 42.6) of the top 1 percent of households in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005
So while you bemoan income inequality, over half of those top 1% earners are dropping out of that group, meaning that others have moved up from below.
Keep up your class warfare. You'll find that this mobility decreases as you fight to take more from the top and give it to the bottom. Instead, try to educate yourself, work hard, save and make wise investments, and you might just find yourself in that top 1% some day instead.
There shouldn't be any fucking choice about whether you "expose" income to taxation! If it's income, it gets taxed.
I think your Congressional representative would disagree with you there. It's called a tax code and it's full of exemptions that people use to legally reduce their tax burden. We can probably agree that these exemptions shouldn't exist, but to villify "the rich" for minimizing their losses legally is ludicrous. Case in point, I bet you probably made a charitable donation or two last tax year and claimed in on your return, or perhaps you deducted mortgage interest - either way, that means you're just part of the problem you hate. The tax code is, and always has been, a tool for modifying behavior. The problem is that the law of unintended consequences always bites even the best of intentions in the ass.
First, a link to a congressional committee is hardly a partisan statement. The Joint Economic Committee is a Congressional Committee that is representative of the government at the time and the report had inputs from all members.
Second, the parts of the report I quoted were illustrative of the fact that tax decreases from 70% to 50% would increase, rather than decrease revenue. The amount of tax burden paid by higher income earners was also part of higher revenues. If you doubt that, here are the numbers in 2010 constant dollars using CPI data (sources http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals/,ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt). For the rest of this post, everything will be in 2010 constant dollars. The numbers are:
Year Revenue
1981 $1428.54M
1982 $1387.16M *first year ERTA was in effect
1983 $1306.56M
1984 $1389.87M
1985 $1478.21M
1986 $1520.67M
1987 $1629.52M
1988 $1665.43M
1989 $1731.93M
1990 $1710.90M
You could argue that the increased revenues were due to improved GDP, but that argument would be wrong. Assuming revenue would grow at the same rate as GDP, and using GDP numbers from http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=5&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Year&FirstYear=2010&LastYear=2011&3Place=N&AllYearsChk=YES&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid we have the following table
Year GDP($M) %Change Expected_Revenue($M) Actual_Revenue($M) Difference($M)
1981 $7,500.74 0.82%
1982 $7,351.09 -1.01% $1,414.15 $1,387.17 -$26.98
1983 $7,738.36 2.57% $1,422.77 $1,306.57 -$116.21
1984 $8,249.82 3.20% $1,348.36 $1,389.88 $41.52
1985 $8,546.94 1.77% $1,414.47 $1,478.22 $63.75
1986 $8,873.65 1.88% $1,505.94 $1,520.67 $14.73
1987 $9,091.55 1.21% $1,539.12 $1,629.52 $90.40
1988 $9,401.29 1.67% $1,656.81 $1,665.43 $8.62
1989 $9,640.36 1.26% $1,686.34 $1,731.93 $45.60
1990 $9,677.38 0.19% $1,735.25 $1,710.90 -$24.35
The total revenue collected over this period was $13820.29M, but GDP growth only accounts for $13723.20M. In other words, the government collected $97.08M more than if ERTA was not enacted, all other considerations held constant.
Third, you're correct in saying that tax reductions didn't necessarily lead to increased tax revenues, but GDP growth doesn't account for that either. The fact that upper income brackets increased their wealth has a lot do with with the reduction of capital gains tax from 28% to 20% which led to many top earners realizing their capital gains, thus increasing their net income. That behavior is documented (but I didn't keep track of that url, sorry) and would explain both phenomenon. GDP growth alone does not.
Again, this is all in reaction to the assertion that we need to go back to 75% tax rates, not an argument for or against much smaller tax cuts or raises in the present per se. You can do the same analysis with the Clinton's 1993 tax increase and you'll find that the tax revenues grow at a lower rate than the overall GDP, indicating that people who can shelter their money, are doing just that, once more highlighting the argument that increasing taxes reduces revenues in the long run.
I posted this for the OP, but thought I'd repost so you could read it too. Stats don't say otherwise. You're simply wrong on that. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2164084&cid=36160390
Just raise the income tax back to pre-Regan era levels
I would say I'm amazed at the economic illiteracy of /.'ers, but it's not really a surprise given political discourse these days. I'll let the Joint Economic Committee do the talking for me. http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-grwth/reagtxct/reagtxct.htm
During the 1980s ERTA had reduced personal tax rates by about 25 percent, while the Tax Reform Act of 1986 chopped them yet again.
after the high marginal tax rates of 1981 were cut, tax payments and the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent climbed sharply. For example, in 1981 the top 1 percent paid 17.6 percent of all personal income taxes, but by 1988 their share had jumped to 27.5 percent, a 10 percentage point increase.
The share of the income tax burden borne by the top 10 percent of taxpayers increased from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. Meanwhile, the share of income taxes paid by the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers dropped from 7.5 percent in 1981 to 5.7 percent in 1988.
The 1993 Clinton tax increase appears to [sic] having the opposite effect on the willingness of wealthy taxpayers to expose income to taxation. According to IRS data, the income generated by the top one percent of income earners actually declined in 1993.
according to the FY 1997 Clinton budget submission, individual income tax revenues as a share of GDP will be lower during the first four years of the Clinton tax increase, which include the effects of the 1990 tax increase, than under the last four years of the Reagan tax changes (FY 1986-89)
Even so, individual income tax revenues rose from $244 billion in 1980 to $446 billion in 1989.
We're the lowest taxed generation since WWII. The highest rate now is 35%, and few pay it. The highest tax bracket in the 90s was 39.6. The highest tax bracket under most of Regan was 50%. Under Nixon was 70%. Kenedy was 91%. Eisenhower was also 91%. The rate coming out of WWII was 94%.
And yet revenue as a percentage of GDP has been increasing all the way up to 2000 (the last decade has many explanations, and I doubt any of them fully capture what really happened) http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?year=1900_2010&units=p&title=Revenue%20as%20percent%20of%20GDP
It's a well understood phenomenon that tax rates and tax revenues are typically not highly correlated.
Well, NOW it's known.
Actually, now it is MODELED. Given that we have no direct experience with planets like this, none of the models can be directly verified, and the authors had to invent a new model just to reach their conclusion, I think it is poor scientific practice to say that is it "confirmed" to be habitable. Instead, it is confirmed that there is a possible path by which it could be habitable, but that just doesn't have the same zing to it, so instead we make wild assertions and let the sci-fi geeks salivate over what amounts to a plausible, but completely unproven, explanation for how things work. While we're at it, I have this model for how the universe was created. We have no way to verify it, but it is at least plausible. I guess we should just call it confirmed and shout down anyone who objects as unscientific.
Or Hitchhiker's Guide, which predates South Park culture by a bit.
I do think it's worth pointing out that 'computer illiterate' should be no more socially acceptable than 'illiterate'
Except that we don't exactly spend 12 years attempting to teach people how to operate their computer, nor is computer literacy a simple yes/no question - can they read? yes. Can they install multiple applications, manage files, understand file extensions, make shortcuts, delete shortcuts, understand what deleting is and why you can sometimes undelete and sometimes not, etc.? Throw in the types of things that matter for the average net user such as "Can they recognize a phishing attack? Malware? Do they know what a trojan is?" and you're stuck with a continuum in which some people are competent, others are at survival level, and others are hopelessly lost. I'd like to see what a primary education class on "computer literacy" would look like. So far, it's been translated to mean typing at a certain wpm and able to open MS Word without coaching.
The prospect of an AI designed by slashdotters makes me tremble with fear.
Nah, you can't build an AI capable of learning if it refuses to read any articles.
I recently moved to a location that is within 1/4 mile of where I work. The cost of housing is so much higher that, counting my gas savings over my previous commute, I'm still losing money on rent over what I paid in gas usage. With the current economy, I'm not going to be able to buy a new car any time soon and expect to drive my truck until it hits 250k (it's halfway there now). The reason I moved was purely a safety/better neighborhood issue. When inner city housing becomes affordable relative to suburban housing, people will make the move and save gas. Until that happens, rail all you want at all those irresponsible people driving big cars, but they're probably saving money over the Prius owner that lives in downtown San Francisco and walks to almost everything they need on a daily basis.
Consequently, a little math:
Consider a car that gets 20mpg on a 15 mile daily one-way commute.
That equates to $0.20 per mile or $6 per day or ~$168/mo.
Rent near work is ~$350/mo more than 15 miles away.
This means that I would either need a car that gets less than 10mpg or gas would have to increase to $8.33 per gallon at 20mpg to make it economically feasible to move downtown. If I bought a Prius instead (assuming 40mpg), the cost of gas has to get up to $16.68 before it's economically feasible. The economic incentive to save gas doesn't really exist when the supply and demand of urban housing is factored in.
P.S. before all the pedants start pointing out cost of driving to the grocery store, etc. due to excessive anti-development activism in this area, I'm actually the same distance from all of those things as I was before. There are no stores in walking or easy biking distance. I still drive 7 miles to get to the main commercial area of town as I did before, so that really isn't a factor. It is also the anti-development fervor that has driven costs up. Go figure.
So is there too much tax money collected or not enough?
Wrong question. Look at the deficit instead. http://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/government-receipts-and-expenditures.png. Note the mostly steady increase in expenditures as revenue dropped. Also note the drop in revenue does not correspond with any tax cuts or "spending in the tax code". The problem here is that we are willing to count 1% reductions in the growth of spending as a spending cut when the actual tax revenues have dropped as a result of the financial meltdown. This is what happens when the real world intrudes on politics. They ignore the real world and keep playing games as usual.
Tax increases aren't going to fix a steadily increasing expenditure unless you propose steadily increasing taxes or you have a steadily increasing economy. Since we currently have neither, the answer is to spend less. If you tax more, the economy grows more slowly and that upward trend becomes a horizontal or downward trend instead. If you spend less, the upward expenditure trend become horizontal and everything will be fine eventually. It's the idea that we can grow our way out of a deficit by having higher growth rate that spending increase rate that has failed us here, not tax receipts.