My reasoning is that effectively there never was a 91% top tax rate. People who entered that tax bracket in the 50's and 60's largely hid their income from that bracket.
Thus it is silly to compare the 91% top tax law of 50 years ago with putting in a 91% top tax rate today. Today we have a tighter tax code with fewer loopholes and also massive computer power and enhanced federal ability to track bank accounts (thanks to the War on Drugs, among other things). Putting in a 91% top tax rate today would be very, very different than it was in the 1950's.
You might be happy that it would be far more effective in collection today, but I would be concerned that it would be far more damaging to the economy today as it would actually be a 91% tax rate, and not just a joke.
"Why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from the value of said CEOs to society as a whole?"
This study notes that "that CEO wealth has been strongly tied to firm performance since the 1930s, and that relationship strengthened considerably after the mid-1980s."
It is possible that paying a CEO a lot of money to make them wealthy is part of making them be effective CEOs. Rich people command respect and attention from most people. Rich people like other rich people. Being rich may allow for CEOs to make the business connections with other rich CEOs. Being rich may allow for rich CEOs to command respect from those they manage.
Anthropologically, it is similar to the concept of the Big Man. You see this not only with CEOs, but also with gang leaders who end up reaping significant pay as a key element to maintain their status as a leader.
1) "The ratio of large-company CEO pay to firm market value is roughly similar to its level in the late-1970s and lower than its pre-1960s levels"
2) "Realized compensation was highly related to firm stock performance. In every size group, firms with CEOs in the top quintile of realized pay were in the top performing quintile; firms with CEOs in the bottom quintile of realized pay were in the worst performing quintile."
3) "CEO turnover levels have increased since the late 1990s, so CEOs can expect to be CEOs for less time than in the past. CEO turnover also has become increasingly related to poor firm stock performance"
4) "Consistent with that, top executive pay policies at over 98% of S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies received majority shareholder support in the Dodd-Frank mandated Say-On-Pay votes in 2011."
There is zero evidence that TDCPP when used as a fire retardant leads to cancer in humans. I wouldn't want to drink it, but that goes for a lot of chemicals.
On the other hand, 2500 people die from fire in the US every year, and 13,000 are injured.
If you want to read a good rebuttal on the fluoride study, see here.
They mention that the high-fluoride areas in these countries reached levels as high as 11.5 mg/L, more than 10 times higher than the optimal level used in the U.S. The authors also added that "reports of lead concentrations in the study villages in China were not available", which could be a major confounding factor.
MP4 is a media file container (technically MPEG-4 Part 14, or ISO/IEC 14496-14).
MPEG-4 Part 10 aka ISO/IEC 14496-10 aka AVC aka ITU-T H.264 is a codec that is often found in MP4 containers (except when it is found in MPEG transport streams, such as in Apple HLS).
There are other video codecs that can be in an MP4 container, such as MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, or MPEG-1.
By the way, HEVC (aka ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 aka ITU-T H.265) is amazingly efficient and everyone should switch to it immediately:)
I don't want to have to uproot my family, find a new job, and start a new life in another state just because the state I happen to live in wants to push religious beliefs onto my kids through the public school system
If the area has a drought then priority for water should be given to human consumption and hygene usages.
If the area has a drought, water should be priced at market prices.
Industrial users will be more sensitive to price increases and will decrease use faster than people who just need a few gallons to take a bath.
And if the price goes up high enough, expensive water reclamation and desalination plants will become economically effective. Or people may start driving in trucks full of water. Free market FTW!
My question for creationists is how can evolution not be possible?
First, there are different alleles out there in any population and it is reasonable to assume that some of them may lead to differential reproductive results, which would change the overall population of existing alleles.
In addition, we know that there are mutations going on all the time as well. For example, a study of 78 Icelandic families whose genealogies were well known sequenced the genomes of 219 distinct individuals (Kong, A., et al. (2012) Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk. Nature 488:471-475. [doi: 10.1038/nature11396]) and found there are about 77 mutations per generation.
So isn't it likely that over billions of generations that there will be significant genetic change based on the interaction between the environment and the reproductive success of individuals?
At the same time, I totally think that biogenesis itself is not understood at all by science - there are just wild guesses right now. I give creationists cover if they want to say that no one really knows how biogenesis happened, but once we get to cells and DNA, the rest is pretty easy to work out.
There are some private schools in Finland (for example, The International School of Helsinki). They are granted the same government funds as public schools, and are required to use the same admissions standards and provide the same services as public schools. The majority of the private schools in Finland are religious.
I think a key element of Finnish schools is that they are managed by the teachers and staff. The local municipal authority in any given region appoints principals for 6/7 year terms, but apart from this appointment, they largely leave the running of the school to the principal and his or her teachers.
Also school choice is big in Finland, especially in cities. In Helsinki, half of the age group transferring to the 7th grade in the basic school had applied for a student place in other catchment area school.
Starting at age 7 points out an important issue - there is ZERO evidence that early education helps students by the time they graduate. Yes, they may start reading earlier, but over time that advantage goes away.
Also Finland does have merit pay for teachers, and also most Finnish 15-year olds go into vocational (rather than general) education.
"For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games"
I remember asking my dad about slope/intercept equations because I wanted to draw line segments on the screen for computer graphics (on my Commodore PET). Then it turned out to be a really useful concept when I learned again it in algebra!
"Here in New Yorkâ¦they...Aren't required to take ALL students."
In California, when enrollment requests exceed the number of seats, charter schools are required by law to hold a public lottery to determine who will attend.
Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.
Which is why more people are going to college, people are living in larger houses, home ownership is up, more people eat out more, households have more cars, people fly more, etc. In general, people at all income levels now have access to many more material possessions than they did in the 1980s. Moreover, there has been a narrowing of the gap between high and low-income classes in terms of ownership of these items.
Health costs do cost more, but you have access to much better health care today than one did 30 years ago. Also health care is more highly regulated today (HIPPA, ACA, etc.)
College education prices are high as well, but perhaps they are inflated by the wide availability of government provided loans?
When you buy a pair of pants, of, say $100, what do you think the person (presumably in China or India) who manufactured it receives? Right, less than $1.
However before the pants factory (and others) were allowed by the PRC government, hundreds of millions of Chinese were making under $1 per DAY who now are making more than that. So even making a few dollars per day is a big step up for them.
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%. There is a lot that goes into selling a pair of pants for $100: marketing, transport & distribution, planning, research, etc.
Your jeans may be made from cotton grown in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or Turkey, woven and dyed in Italy, cut in India, then go to one of 35 countries for assembly. Not just China, but also Bangladesh, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka.
You may want to compare your article's data with FRED's Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour (COMPRNFB) which shows a 35% increase over 40 years.
The article says it is using data from only production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector and comparing it to productivity is for the total economy. If it could compare productivity just for production/nonsupervisory workers then there might be a case, but how could you even do that without firing all non-production and supervisory workers? I've had some great bosses that really improved my productivity by guiding my work. This is the same mistake as trying to compare a MINIMUM wage with AVERAGE productivity.
FRED only puts out a nominal Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private (AHETPI), not an inflation adjusted series, but suffice it to say that over 40 years, AHETPI has gone from $3/hr to $20/hr. Based on the BLS CPI calculator, $3/hr in 1973 is $15.75/hr today, so there has been real gains. Also it is not clear to me that the productivity data mentioned has been inflation adjusted.
You may want to look at BLS Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share (PRS85006173) which is labor compensation divided by value added. It certainly has been going down, but very slowly.
It should also be kept in mind that a 52% of americans hold equity capital positions, so most people are benefiting from the return to capital.
Also over 40 years, the US has acquired 30 million foreign born people from immigration, most of them lower skilled, but almost all of them making more for their labor in the US than they would in their home country.
It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.
What is your definition of the middle class, and what are your precise metrics on "in decline"?
For example, of the 3.2 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2012, about 2.1 million (66.2%) were enrolled in college in October. That doesn't sound like much of a decline to me.
If the "big flippers" didn't convince Safeway to shutter Dominick's, Safeway's clearly feeble management would have just thrown away more shareholder value in trying to keep them going.
Sometimes you have to know when to stop, and activist shareholders are often the only answer to managerial hubris.
If you "dismember" a corporation to achieve a >15% ROI, then obviously the people buying the assets must have been convinced that there is a way to use those assets to generate higher profits.
Sometimes corporations are just stupid, and are more productive with someone else owning their parts than with the current management owning all of them.
My view of corporate management is that management rarely learns from mistakes. Great companies are largely lucky ones. It is more of a process of evolution where companies that luck into high profitability survive and those that don't flounder. Economist Joseph Schumpetet called this "creative destruction."
Complex systems are challenging to centrally control, and systems made up of tens of thousands of human beings are very, very complex.
Regarding the 91% top marginal tax rate, it is now generally recognized that most income in that bracket was "tax avoided" through various legal and illegal means.
Good evidence for this was that after the "Kennedy Tax Cut" that reduced the top marginal rate from 91% to 70% passed in early 1964, total income tax revenues rose in 1964 and 1965.
We should keep in mind that the IBM S/360 was only announced in 1964. The Federal Government had little power to analyze tax avoidance schemes, and likely there was little political will to actually prosecute powerful rich people for tax cheating.
Slashdot Mirror
Your reasoning baffles me.
My reasoning is that effectively there never was a 91% top tax rate. People who entered that tax bracket in the 50's and 60's largely hid their income from that bracket.
Thus it is silly to compare the 91% top tax law of 50 years ago with putting in a 91% top tax rate today. Today we have a tighter tax code with fewer loopholes and also massive computer power and enhanced federal ability to track bank accounts (thanks to the War on Drugs, among other things). Putting in a 91% top tax rate today would be very, very different than it was in the 1950's.
You might be happy that it would be far more effective in collection today, but I would be concerned that it would be far more damaging to the economy today as it would actually be a 91% tax rate, and not just a joke.
US Federal income tax, $billion:
1960: 62.2
1961: 62.3
1962: 66.1
1963: 69.2
[tax cuts]
1964: 72.2
1965: 74.3
1966: 85.5
"Why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from the value of said CEOs to society as a whole?"
This study notes that "that CEO wealth has been strongly tied to firm performance since the 1930s, and that relationship strengthened considerably after the mid-1980s."
It is possible that paying a CEO a lot of money to make them wealthy is part of making them be effective CEOs. Rich people command respect and attention from most people. Rich people like other rich people. Being rich may allow for CEOs to make the business connections with other rich CEOs. Being rich may allow for rich CEOs to command respect from those they manage.
Anthropologically, it is similar to the concept of the Big Man. You see this not only with CEOs, but also with gang leaders who end up reaping significant pay as a key element to maintain their status as a leader.
"The 80%-90% top marginal rates in the USA didn't drive out the rich in the past"
Yes, and after the Kennedy tax cuts reduced top marginal rate from 91% to 70%, income tax revenue increased in 1964 and 1965.
So if tax rates are cut, yet revenues went up, how could that be?
Perhaps there was a tremendous amount of tax avoidance by the rich?
1) "The ratio of large-company CEO pay to firm market value is roughly similar to its level in the late-1970s and lower than its pre-1960s levels"
2) "Realized compensation was highly related to firm stock performance. In every size group, firms with CEOs in the top quintile of realized pay were in the top performing quintile; firms with CEOs in the bottom quintile of realized pay were in the worst performing quintile."
3) "CEO turnover levels have increased since the late 1990s, so CEOs can expect to be CEOs for less time than in the past. CEO turnover also has become increasingly related to poor firm stock performance"
4) "Consistent with that, top executive pay policies at over 98% of S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies received majority shareholder support in the Dodd-Frank mandated Say-On-Pay votes in 2011."
Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance in the U.S.: Perceptions, Facts and Challenges
If you are really worried about your kid's IQâ¦
â¦only mate with someone with a high IQ. That will go a lot farther to raising their IQ than taking away your kid's BPA bottle.
Heritability of IQ is about 50%-80% depending on which study you read.
There is zero evidence that TDCPP when used as a fire retardant leads to cancer in humans. I wouldn't want to drink it, but that goes for a lot of chemicals.
On the other hand, 2500 people die from fire in the US every year, and 13,000 are injured.
If you want to read a good rebuttal on the fluoride study, see here.
They mention that the high-fluoride areas in these countries reached levels as high as 11.5 mg/L, more than 10 times higher than the optimal level used in the U.S. The authors also added that "reports of lead concentrations in the study villages in China were not available", which could be a major confounding factor.
MP4 is a media file container (technically MPEG-4 Part 14, or ISO/IEC 14496-14).
MPEG-4 Part 10 aka ISO/IEC 14496-10 aka AVC aka ITU-T H.264 is a codec that is often found in MP4 containers (except when it is found in MPEG transport streams, such as in Apple HLS).
There are other video codecs that can be in an MP4 container, such as MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-2, or MPEG-1.
By the way, HEVC (aka ISO/IEC 23008-2 MPEG-H Part 2 aka ITU-T H.265) is amazingly efficient and everyone should switch to it immediately :)
I don't want to have to uproot my family, find a new job, and start a new life in another state just because the state I happen to live in wants to push religious beliefs onto my kids through the public school system
Socialist monopoly education is its own reward...
If the area has a drought then priority for water should be given to human consumption and hygene usages.
If the area has a drought, water should be priced at market prices.
Industrial users will be more sensitive to price increases and will decrease use faster than people who just need a few gallons to take a bath.
And if the price goes up high enough, expensive water reclamation and desalination plants will become economically effective. Or people may start driving in trucks full of water. Free market FTW!
My question for creationists is how can evolution not be possible?
First, there are different alleles out there in any population and it is reasonable to assume that some of them may lead to differential reproductive results, which would change the overall population of existing alleles.
In addition, we know that there are mutations going on all the time as well. For example, a study of 78 Icelandic families whose genealogies were well known sequenced the genomes of 219 distinct individuals (Kong, A., et al. (2012) Rate of de novo mutations and the importance of father's age to disease risk. Nature 488:471-475. [doi: 10.1038/nature11396]) and found there are about 77 mutations per generation.
So isn't it likely that over billions of generations that there will be significant genetic change based on the interaction between the environment and the reproductive success of individuals?
At the same time, I totally think that biogenesis itself is not understood at all by science - there are just wild guesses right now. I give creationists cover if they want to say that no one really knows how biogenesis happened, but once we get to cells and DNA, the rest is pretty easy to work out.
Weren't OLEDs supposed to deliver a lot of that same stuff a few years ago? What ever happened with that?
You can purchase the Samsung KN55S9C â' 55" OLED Smart TV today, and they are expecting 65" and 75" later this year.
If you assault people, you might get shot.
I generally operate under this belief where I live.
"Finland has no private schools."
There are some private schools in Finland (for example, The International School of Helsinki). They are granted the same government funds as public schools, and are required to use the same admissions standards and provide the same services as public schools. The majority of the private schools in Finland are religious.
I think a key element of Finnish schools is that they are managed by the teachers and staff. The local municipal authority in any given region appoints principals for 6/7 year terms, but apart from this appointment, they largely leave the running of the school to the principal and his or her teachers.
Also school choice is big in Finland, especially in cities. In Helsinki, half of the age group transferring to the 7th grade in the basic school had applied for a student place in other catchment area school.
Starting at age 7 points out an important issue - there is ZERO evidence that early education helps students by the time they graduate. Yes, they may start reading earlier, but over time that advantage goes away.
Also Finland does have merit pay for teachers, and also most Finnish 15-year olds go into vocational (rather than general) education.
"For example, I learned most of my core trigonometry well before I ran into it in school, because I wanted to write space combat games"
I remember asking my dad about slope/intercept equations because I wanted to draw line segments on the screen for computer graphics (on my Commodore PET). Then it turned out to be a really useful concept when I learned again it in algebra!
"Here in New Yorkâ¦they...Aren't required to take ALL students."
In California, when enrollment requests exceed the number of seats, charter schools are required by law to hold a public lottery to determine who will attend.
Sure, people can afford to have computers and DVD players and game consoles that didn't exist a generation ago, but the essentials of a middle-class life are getting more and more expensive relative to a middle-class income.
Which is why more people are going to college, people are living in larger houses, home ownership is up, more people eat out more, households have more cars, people fly more, etc. In general, people at all income levels now have access to many more material possessions than they did in the 1980s. Moreover, there has been a narrowing of the gap between high and low-income classes in terms of ownership of these items.
Health costs do cost more, but you have access to much better health care today than one did 30 years ago. Also health care is more highly regulated today (HIPPA, ACA, etc.)
College education prices are high as well, but perhaps they are inflated by the wide availability of government provided loans?
When you buy a pair of pants, of, say $100, what do you think the person (presumably in China or India) who manufactured it receives? Right, less than $1.
However before the pants factory (and others) were allowed by the PRC government, hundreds of millions of Chinese were making under $1 per DAY who now are making more than that. So even making a few dollars per day is a big step up for them.
By the way, for the quarter ending Aug. 25, 2013 Levi Strauss reported a profit of $57.1 million on revenues of $1.14 billion, for a profit margin of 5%. There is a lot that goes into selling a pair of pants for $100: marketing, transport & distribution, planning, research, etc.
Your jeans may be made from cotton grown in Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or Turkey, woven and dyed in Italy, cut in India, then go to one of 35 countries for assembly. Not just China, but also Bangladesh, Cambodia, Dominican Republic, and Sri Lanka.
You may want to compare your article's data with FRED's Nonfarm Business Sector: Real Compensation Per Hour (COMPRNFB) which shows a 35% increase over 40 years.
The article says it is using data from only production/nonsupervisory workers in the private sector and comparing it to productivity is for the total economy. If it could compare productivity just for production/nonsupervisory workers then there might be a case, but how could you even do that without firing all non-production and supervisory workers? I've had some great bosses that really improved my productivity by guiding my work. This is the same mistake as trying to compare a MINIMUM wage with AVERAGE productivity.
FRED only puts out a nominal Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private (AHETPI), not an inflation adjusted series, but suffice it to say that over 40 years, AHETPI has gone from $3/hr to $20/hr. Based on the BLS CPI calculator, $3/hr in 1973 is $15.75/hr today, so there has been real gains. Also it is not clear to me that the productivity data mentioned has been inflation adjusted.
You may want to look at BLS Nonfarm Business Sector: Labor Share (PRS85006173) which is labor compensation divided by value added. It certainly has been going down, but very slowly.
It should also be kept in mind that a 52% of americans hold equity capital positions, so most people are benefiting from the return to capital.
Also over 40 years, the US has acquired 30 million foreign born people from immigration, most of them lower skilled, but almost all of them making more for their labor in the US than they would in their home country.
It would be an awesome first step if we could all just agree that the middle class (at least in America) is in decline from what it was one generation or two generations ago, and that that has several bad consequences, and that we should try to think of ways to reverse this trend.
What is your definition of the middle class, and what are your precise metrics on "in decline"?
For example, of the 3.2 million youth age 16 to 24 who graduated from high school between January and October 2012, about 2.1 million (66.2%) were enrolled in college in October. That doesn't sound like much of a decline to me.
If the "big flippers" didn't convince Safeway to shutter Dominick's, Safeway's clearly feeble management would have just thrown away more shareholder value in trying to keep them going.
Sometimes you have to know when to stop, and activist shareholders are often the only answer to managerial hubris.
If you "dismember" a corporation to achieve a >15% ROI, then obviously the people buying the assets must have been convinced that there is a way to use those assets to generate higher profits.
Sometimes corporations are just stupid, and are more productive with someone else owning their parts than with the current management owning all of them.
My view of corporate management is that management rarely learns from mistakes. Great companies are largely lucky ones. It is more of a process of evolution where companies that luck into high profitability survive and those that don't flounder. Economist Joseph Schumpetet called this "creative destruction."
Complex systems are challenging to centrally control, and systems made up of tens of thousands of human beings are very, very complex.
A great natural experiment on this is the North Dakota shale boom.
In Williston, ND, one of the highest grossing McDonalds in the US does pay $15/hour, but the Big Mac costs $1 more than the US average.
Regarding the 91% top marginal tax rate, it is now generally recognized that most income in that bracket was "tax avoided" through various legal and illegal means.
Good evidence for this was that after the "Kennedy Tax Cut" that reduced the top marginal rate from 91% to 70% passed in early 1964, total income tax revenues rose in 1964 and 1965.
We should keep in mind that the IBM S/360 was only announced in 1964. The Federal Government had little power to analyze tax avoidance schemes, and likely there was little political will to actually prosecute powerful rich people for tax cheating.