Insurance is interstate commerce. The "healthcare" bill was really about insurance. Not that that gives the government the right to make people buy things from private companies. Nevertheless, the government can do just about anything a corporation they chartered can do, including providing services such as insurance. The government can do a better job at insurance than any company because they can get a larger risk pool than any company and they are service rather than profit driven, so they have a motivation to get costs down in order to provide better service rather than a motivation to shift the costs onto customers, providers and the uninsured as insurance companies do today.
Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to just buy out an existing small island nation already recognized internationally. Some of them could go for as little as a few hundred million dollars, or even less if all you wanted was the slavish cooperation of their government. Hell, I think you could buy all of Congress, the presidency and a state government or three for a couple of billion carefully spent, at least if you got some cooperation from the current corporate owners.
Today we have a separate, legally unaccountable bureaucracy for every insurance company, each with different forms, arcane constantly changing rules, making fiat decisions to deny care for no reason other than that it would be cheaper to let you die or go bankrupt than to honor their contract with you. One of the biggest potential benefits of a single-payer system would be to replace that jungle of bureaucracies with a single, accountable and consistent bureaucracy with 1/10th the people and no profit motive to deny care capriciously. Obamacare does not do this, though it takes some baby steps in that direction. The 2nd biggest waste in healthcare comes from having an armies of people to prepare claims and armies of people to deny them.
(The 3rd biggest waste is that the government does not use its buying power with drug companies to get the best prices. The 1st biggest is that pricing for all services, devices and drugs is not transparent and consistent, whether via an open market or otherwise.)
Well, I've got to say that Rage (on which Carmack spent the last six years or so implementing a "megatexture" hack that was worth maybe a couple of months) looks like crap compared to Crysis. Everything looks smeary (marketed as "painterly" and "atmospheric").
And while Crysis may waste polygons, Rage doles them out like a miser - the main character's head has visible lumps - it's actually even pointed. His big, round shoulder pads get about half a dozen polygons each - you can see the corners and seams of the mesh. Anything round looks like it was whittled with an ax. Constant 60 fps is not that important if the frames themselves are nothing but giant paintings over meshes that could have come from a game from 10 years ago. Maybe the gameplay makes up for it, but when watching the Rage trailers the suspension of disbelief is constantly being knocked down by lousy details.
OTOH, the Jersey barrier in Crysis that TFA takes such an issue with looks so hyper-real that it just makes you go "wow!" The only thing is, it looked just as good before the tesselation. The effort would have been better spent on the leaves in that scene, which only look a little better with the amount of tesselation they used.
Correct. But the whole question is a red herring. These drugs are all dangerous and have side effects which the companies would prefer not to mention. They are routinely promoted by the drug companies to doctors for off label uses. For instance, Seroquel is not an anti depressant as the summary states - it is an antipsychotic which is only proven against schizophrenia - even the use in bipolar disorder is the wrong drug except for fully psychotic episodes. Seroquel causes many nasty neurological effects including tardive dyskinesia (permanent), neuroleptic malignant syndrome (sometimes fatal), seizures, as well as the usual mental dulling, lack of energy, weight gain often leading to diabetes, and other very serious side effects. All the antipsychotics are obscenely over-prescribed and highly dangerous. In fact, the same is true of all the psychiatric drugs that aren't completely ineffective, and some that are.
Yes the promoter's site shows that it's a total scam. The paper on laser fission of thorium that you linked to shows it's at least a factor of a billion away from break-even.
Well, maybe you can't make an nuclear reaction just by hitting it with a laser. (I'd try a beryllium hammer, first, personally.) But with a sufficient supply of weapons-grade stupidity, plus some nuclear materials, one can certainly make lots of neutrons really, really fast. Adding some lasers could only make the conversion of stupidity into neutrons more efficient..
(Link is to 158 page pdf "Review of Criticality Accidents" Los Alamos, 2000 / a.k.a "Stupid Reactor Tricks", but also processing plant disasters, experiments gone horribly wrong, etc.)
Thanks, I'll take a look at the census data. I was working from the IRS data at: SOI Tax Stats - Individual Time Series Statistical Tables, but some data for more recent years is also available in more difficult to use form at: SOI Tax Stats - Individual Statistical Tables by Size of Adjusted Gross Income. The IRS data has categories on higher levels of income than the census data, and this allows seeing just how concentrated income really is at the top. For instance, nearly 1/6 of all income in 2007 went tho the 0.28% making over $1M per year.
Here is the 2007 IRS data, with "share" defined as "Share of total income divided by percentage of population". An equal share = 1. Also shown is the percentage of households falling into each category.
Income - % of Population - Share $5,000 under $7,000 . . 3.38% . 0.1 $7,000 under $9,000 . . 3.47% . 0.13 $9,000 under $11,000 ..3.25% . 0.16 $11,000 under $13,000 . 3.37% . 0.2 $13,000 under $15,000 . 3.33% . 0.23 $15,000 under $17,000 . 3.18% . 0.26 $17,000 under $19,000 . 3.04% . 0.3 $19,000 under $22,000 . 4.42% . 0.34 $22,000 under $25,000 . 4.06% . 0.39 $25,000 under $30,000 . 6.30% . 0.45 $30,000 under $40,000 . 10.31%. 0.57 $40,000 under $50,000 . 7.80% . 0.74 $50,000 under $75,000 . 13.60%. 1.01 $75,000 under $100K . . 8.21% . 1.42 $100K under $200K . . . 9.41% . 2.19 $200K under $500K ....2.44% . 4.73 $500K under $1M ..... 0.46% . 11.16 $1M under $1.5M ..... 0.12% . 19.86 $1.5M under $2M ..... 0.05% . 28.33 $2M under $5M ..... . 0.076% . 49.17 $5M under $10M ... . . 0.02% . 112.68 $10M or more ....... 0.013% . 502.49 (The % of all income earned by each category can be found by multiplying the two numbers together.)
Another interesting statistic is that those making over $1M make nearly as much as everybody earning under $40K combined. (That's 57% of the population making about the same as 0.28% of the population).
While inflation supposedly has been low (I'd say it has been understated at least 1-2% during this period to make GDP growth appear positive and keep government cost-of-living-adjustment expenses down), even using the official numbers that's compounded so that a 2002 dollar is worth over $1.25 today. If the inflation figures are too low by 1.5%, its more like $1.43. Inflation for the rich has likely been higher than for other segments of the population - for instance, boarding schools have quadrupled tuition over a period when the CPI only doubled (since the late '80s).
So using the official figures, $100K today is $79.7K in 2002. That is a big enough difference that eyeballing the figures is not going to work. The problem is that the categories themselves are what needs to be adjusted for inflation, while the available figures are categorized by nominal dollar earnings, so it's hard to compare across years. The Census data also shows the cutoff earnings for each quintile over time, and these can be inflation-adjusted. Here's a graph of that. In inflation adjusted terms, essentially all the real increase in earnings over the past 40 years has gone to the top 20%, virtually all of it to the top 5%. (That's in dollars. In percents things look more even, but that's an illusion.) The bottom 20% have seen shrinking / flat real earnings for several decades. Many people will rise over time in the distribution, but on average the lower you start, the lower you end up, and the more quickly income gains will tend to stop. With
For more recent figures (2007) 3.22% of the returns (AGI over $200,000) made 40.39% of the total income and paid 54.65% of the Federal income tax. But this does not count Social Security or Medicare taxes, nor does it count State taxes. These latter are regressive taxes.
Estimating these as above, the $200,000+ club made about 29% of the after-tax income and had a total tax burden in the neighborhood of 43%, compared to an average for the whole population of about 35%. This doesn't seem unduly high, especially if any allowance is made for subsistence, as in my post above. (And nearly 97% of the population made less than $200K, so that group has little effect on the overall figures.) The total tax burden number for the category of "$200K+" is pulled down somewhat by those making over $10M, who paid only 40% on average.
More than half of all federal income tax (55%) comes from those making $50-500K. (Again, this ignores, Social Security contributions, which almost all come from those making less than $100K -SS is a flat 12.4% tax with a cap at $107K; less than 13% of returns are above $100K. These SS receipts were $784.9B in 2007, vs. total income tax receipts of $1116B). Once we add that in, we see that about 56% of the taxes are paid by those making less than $100K, a group that only earns around a 47% share of the income.
I actually did the calculations using the IRS numbers. I also tried to adjust for Social Security taxes (both sides = 12.4% on the first $107K), Medicare (2.9%) and State taxes. The latter varies wildly depending on the state, but a good rough estimate overall is 10% on the first 100K (mostly sales tax, excise tax and misc. fees) and 5% on income after the first $100K (mostly income and property tax). Note that the rich still pay 10% state tax on the first $100K. This drop in effective taxes occurs because consumption and thus sales taxes are lower as a percentage of income in higher income groups, they are more likely to be able to avoid taxes by buying non-food expenditures on the Internet or while traveling, they are more likely to move to low or no-income-tax states. Even without the state tax approximation, or making a flat or progressive approximation, the qualitative results are the same.
By dividing the average AGI for each category by the estimated after-tax income and subtracting the result from 1 we get the effective tax rates: (add 1 to 5% to percentages above $100K if you don't buy the state tax calculation) Total average tax rate: 34.89% No adjusted gross income [1] 100.00% $1 under $1,000 25.31% $1,000 under $3,000 25.58% $3,000 under $5,000 25.52% $5,000 under $7,000 25.70% $7,000 under $9,000 25.85% $9,000 under $11,000 26.01% $11,000 under $13,000 26.36% $13,000 under $15,000 26.60% $15,000 under $17,000 26.84% $17,000 under $19,000 27.12% $19,000 under $22,000 27.52% $22,000 under $25,000 27.87% $25,000 under $30,000 28.40% $30,000 under $40,000 29.36% $40,000 under $50,000 30.31% $50,000 under $75,000 31.35% $75,000 under $100,000 32.21% $100,000 under $200,000 34.83% $200,000 under $500,000 39.90% $500,000 under $1,000,000 42.76% $1,000,000 under $1,500,000 43.29% $1,500,000 under $2,000,000 43.31% $2,000,000 under $5,000,000 43.15% $5,000,000 under $10,000,000 42.36% $10,000,000 or more 40.04% [1]These people had negative income but still paid income tax, and presumably other taxes as well - the nominal rate was set at 100%, though it is really infinite.
But if we subtract a nominal $10K from the average gross earnings in each category to represent a minimal after-tax budget for essentials such as food and shelter: Total tax burden after paying for essentials: Total 51.35% No adjusted gross income [1] 100.00% $1 under $1,000 1935.57% $1,000 under $3,000 523.62% $3,000 under $5,000 276.33% $5,000 under $7,000 192.67% $7,000 under $9,000 150.84% $9,000 under $11,000 125.98% $11,000 under $13,000 109.77% $13,000 under $15,000 98.06% $15,000 under $17,000 89.41% $17,000 under $19,000 82.67% $19,000 under $22,000 76.34% $22,000 under $25,000 70.44% $25,000 under $30,000 64.82% $30,000 under $40,000 58.10% $40,000 under $50,000 52.64% $50,000 under $75,000 47.62% $75,000 under $100,000 43.78% $100,000 under $200,000 42.33% $200,000 under $500,000 43.38% $500,000 under $1,000,000 44.23% $1,000,000 under $1,500,000 44.12% $1,500,000 under $2,000,000 43.89% $2,000,000 under $5,000,000 43.48% $5,000,000 under $10,000,000 42.51% $10,000,000 or more 40.08%
You would have to reduce the budget for essentials to less than $5300 before a family making $40-50K (mean $44.8K AGI) would not be paying a higher tax rate than one making $200-500K (mean $288K).
No, when you add the obligations for pensions and so forth in the manner that businesses are required to do, the debt is about five times the usually quoted number, $70-80T. The ~$15T is just the bonds.
Also $2.1T is a lot of income. That's about the combined take-home pay of 2/3 - 4/5 of the nation. (2007 IRS figures: 65% of returns had AGI below $50,000. The total AGI for these, not counting those with negative AGI, was $1.947T, or about $1.38T after Federal and State taxes, including SS, Medicare, and sales tax. The combined take-home pay for those making under $75K AGI (79% of all returns) was only about $2.21T. 2007 figures are the latest non-preliminary figures at hand.)
Well, the worst ones never came near Fannie and Freddie, they were insured by CDOs sold by AIG, who never put aside any money when it sold the CDOs. The toxic mortgage fractions bundled with AIG CDOs somehow became AAA securities. Goldman Sachs (a.k.a. "the vampire squid", "the Treasury", the "regulators", and "your masters") had bought a lot of those CDOs, so AIG got bailed out.
"regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please. the U.S. is hurtling at full speed towards a deficit meltdown, and quibbling over S&P's math doesn't change the fact that the country needs to come to terms with it ASAP."
True. Arguing over $2T is silly (i.e. whether the tax cuts will be allowed to expire, an eventuality less likely than default itself, if one factors in the likelihood of failure to pay Social Security obligations in the near term - and don't forget SS is the biggest bondholder). The debt, calculated according to GAAP standards is between $70-80T, not ~$15T. The US debt is not only higher than US GDP, but higher than WORLD GDP. The only way out is inflation and monetizing the debt. The Fed is the only buyer for the debt, anyway, might as well admit it. Stop shoveling the stimulus funds to the banks to act as straw buyers for the debt, do it directly, cut the banks off from the tit and they'll be forced to start making loans to the public if they want to have any earnings. (And if they balk, mark their crummy assets to market and shut them down.)
Cutting federal expenditures could be of some help in cases where the activity being paid for is sufficiently harmful (e.g. stupid weapons systems, stupid wars), but serious cuts in most of the budget would actually hurt the economy - more unemployment, less demand, lower GDP. Redirecting spending to areas with the most positive leverage is a more responsible way to go - startups, manufacturing, infrastructure. Other high-payoff programs: food stamps and condemnation and subsidized rental of foreclosed but untitled properties and unmaintained bank-owned properties. We need to grow the tax base, and that means industrial and trade policy, intelligent tariffs, corporate tax rules that favor repatriation of profits and domestic production. It means raising taxes and closing loopholes so that investors have to scramble to make a profit. (Don't worry, you can still deduct your payroll from your taxable profit. But most of the other deductions need to go away, including payment of corporate officers over twice the median wage.)
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well." No, rather: Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
Well, I can't say what you meant by that post, but one (undoubtedly privileged) construction of what I think I thought you thought you meant was: Oog! Thumpa Thumpa! me big intellectual literary critic! You beta critic! Me get all the hairy-legged deconstructionist poontang! Of all constructions of nominal sexuality!
Not after paying for essentials. Not when counting all taxes - state, sales, excise, social security, and medicare, let alone the kickbacks the rich get from government, not even counting the bailouts they alone got, bailouts for the rich which I estimate were more than the bottom third of Americans were paid in the whole history of America. Hell, the rich and their instruments, the corporations, take over $200B in tax deductions after deducting everything you could think think of: salaries, depreciation, all costs, rents, taxes- after all that, and after all the fraudulent accounting, it's still over $200B per year, just in miscellaneous tax deductions.
And even if the rich did pay most taxes - so what? Compared to the fraction of the disposable national income they command - not through worth, but through theft, fraud and power - they do not even pay their share. Let them move to China, where they sent our manufacturing, if they think they are so poorly treated here. Let their jesters and fools from the Chicago school soothe them as they are wrongfully deprived of their rightful computer bookeeping entries, these mighty who shuffled paper and pulled strings, these bland scions, these New York hustlers, these half-witted MBAs and their mouthpieces,these parasites who stole the nation, who disinherited and disposessed and destroyed the wealth and dignity of America, the birthright of all those real workers who made and moved and created for a living.
"'do I oppose the fractional reserve system, whereby banks can, as an example, lend $100 for each $10 in deposits they take in', my answer would be no, I'm not opposed to that." Then you are in favor of allowing fraud for privileged cronies of the money cartel. (Fractional reserves could make sense if 10-year deposits were matched by a proportional amount of 10-year loans, but that's not what happens. All deposits, including demand deposits go into a sweep account. Which used to matter before the Fed started giving out free money and the banks started charging interest on deposits while refuing to loan money for any constructive purpose.)
"I'm most certainly opposed to bailouts of any sort" Then you are opposed to the existence of most of the major banks and financial firms. They would have gone out of business without the bailouts. You are opposed to allowing the Fed to set rates, to giving its favored members unlimited access to loans at near-zero interest. Thus you are opposed to allowing the present shareholders of those firms to keep their entirely bailout-derived wealth , and all the secondary beneficiaries to keep that portion of their holdings that is due to the bailouts. Right? No, you are lying. You will undoubtedly claim that whoever holds wealth is presumptively entitled to it. You think that the Brit aristocrats are entitled to the land they seized via the enclosure acts, that the American farmers hold land according to the deeds in the county offices, (despite what any Indian treaties might say), that the Israeli land titles are good (despite whatever the Ottoman records say), that the banks' titles are good (despite the securitization, fraudulent selling of the same mortgage multiple times, lack of registration of titles, evasion of legal requirements, mass forgery of documents etc. etc.). No, all the wealth coming from that is due to pluck and initiative, just like all the wealth from hedge funds taxed at 15% ( half of the effective tax rate of a secretary), just like all the other wealth due to "investment" of other people's money on a "heads I win, tails you lose" basis.
"I'm about as far removed from supporting welfare of any sort, corporate included." No doubt excepting the entire "defense" budget. And the wonderful profits that the oil companies got from keeping the Iraqi oil off the market. And all the corporate "intellectual property" due to public funding of research, given away free. And the student loans, not dischargable in bankruptcy, yet guaranteed by the government that have so enriched the banks. And the insurance company giveaways too numerous to recount.
No, you're going to be against honoring the obligations of Social Security and Medicare, insurance programs that ordinary people paid for, that have always run yearly surpluses, that the rich did not pay for (at least on SS over present-equivalent earnings over ~100K - a regressive tax), which were looted to pay for corporate welfare to war profiteers. Got it. Contracts are sacred, except for those with poor and middle-class people forced at the barrel of a gun to buy insurance. Only those who take government money to ship the economy to China are really independent businessmen worthy of our respect and exemptions from all taxes (well, also those who offer private prisons at public expense, literally enslaving prisoners whose "crimes" were created by endless lobbying by the prison owners, they deserve not only the prisoners' labor for free to sell as they wish in competition with the taxpaying workers (not yet officially claimed as serfs), but the prison owners also deserve a subsidy, and lots of tax breaks, and immunity from lawsuits. Well no act of Congress will make those prison owners immune to the massive trauma they deserve, and will in time receive. And the same is true of those who, like you, are shills for this violent expropriation.)
The employees have always paid 100% of their healthcare and their pensions, and 100% of the corporations' profits. Everything the shareholders and the management have ever taken has been the fruits of the employees' work.
You are on the side of inhuman collectives, corporations, artificial legal creatures spawned by government for the express purpose of avoiding responsibility. Your talking points are noise. When the citizenry no longer makes enough to buy the crap for which your patrons shipped manufacturing offshore, (i.e. now) then their sales will plummet even as they cut employment. Your masters have cut their own throats.
Your sort aren't really in favor of open markets or competition - as J.P. Morgan said: "competition is a sin." You put out your Chicago-school free-market propaganda, but you don't really want competition, only Fed and government-backed oligarchy. You have never really read Adam Smith, you couldn't distinguish between comparative and absolute advantage in the real world if your quarterly results depended on it. You don't even know Ricardo's "Iron Law of Wages", let alone the rest of Ricardo, or any of the assumptions that the big-name economists that you like to cite (if only when backed into a corner) made. You're a poseur, your opinions are all third-hand, you know nothing, and are worth even less.
If you object to collective bargaining by workers, then presumably you object to collective bargaining by capital - that is, the management representatives of banks fraudulently lending out 20x the money they ultimately got either from workers or their private, government-backed cartel, the Federal Reserve. Collective, Soviet-style capital, totalitarian fiefs backstopped with multi-trillion-dollar bailouts from the supposed people's government because they threatened to fly the economy straight into the ground?
Quit trolling, asswipe. We don't need any filching, scum-licking apologists for the inhuman parasitic corporate welfare class you whore for here.
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Insurance is interstate commerce. The "healthcare" bill was really about insurance. Not that that gives the government the right to make people buy things from private companies. Nevertheless, the government can do just about anything a corporation they chartered can do, including providing services such as insurance. The government can do a better job at insurance than any company because they can get a larger risk pool than any company and they are service rather than profit driven, so they have a motivation to get costs down in order to provide better service rather than a motivation to shift the costs onto customers, providers and the uninsured as insurance companies do today.
Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to just buy out an existing small island nation already recognized internationally. Some of them could go for as little as a few hundred million dollars, or even less if all you wanted was the slavish cooperation of their government. Hell, I think you could buy all of Congress, the presidency and a state government or three for a couple of billion carefully spent, at least if you got some cooperation from the current corporate owners.
Today we have a separate, legally unaccountable bureaucracy for every insurance company, each with different forms, arcane constantly changing rules, making fiat decisions to deny care for no reason other than that it would be cheaper to let you die or go bankrupt than to honor their contract with you. One of the biggest potential benefits of a single-payer system would be to replace that jungle of bureaucracies with a single, accountable and consistent bureaucracy with 1/10th the people and no profit motive to deny care capriciously. Obamacare does not do this, though it takes some baby steps in that direction. The 2nd biggest waste in healthcare comes from having an armies of people to prepare claims and armies of people to deny them.
(The 3rd biggest waste is that the government does not use its buying power with drug companies to get the best prices. The 1st biggest is that pricing for all services, devices and drugs is not transparent and consistent, whether via an open market or otherwise.)
Well, I've got to say that Rage (on which Carmack spent the last six years or so implementing a "megatexture" hack that was worth maybe a couple of months) looks like crap compared to Crysis. Everything looks smeary (marketed as "painterly" and "atmospheric").
And while Crysis may waste polygons, Rage doles them out like a miser - the main character's head has visible lumps - it's actually even pointed. His big, round shoulder pads get about half a dozen polygons each - you can see the corners and seams of the mesh. Anything round looks like it was whittled with an ax. Constant 60 fps is not that important if the frames themselves are nothing but giant paintings over meshes that could have come from a game from 10 years ago. Maybe the gameplay makes up for it, but when watching the Rage trailers the suspension of disbelief is constantly being knocked down by lousy details.
OTOH, the Jersey barrier in Crysis that TFA takes such an issue with looks so hyper-real that it just makes you go "wow!" The only thing is, it looked just as good before the tesselation. The effort would have been better spent on the leaves in that scene, which only look a little better with the amount of tesselation they used.
Not a troll. Truth.
Correct. But the whole question is a red herring. These drugs are all dangerous and have side effects which the companies would prefer not to mention. They are routinely promoted by the drug companies to doctors for off label uses. For instance, Seroquel is not an anti depressant as the summary states - it is an antipsychotic which is only proven against schizophrenia - even the use in bipolar disorder is the wrong drug except for fully psychotic episodes. Seroquel causes many nasty neurological effects including tardive dyskinesia (permanent), neuroleptic malignant syndrome (sometimes fatal), seizures, as well as the usual mental dulling, lack of energy, weight gain often leading to diabetes, and other very serious side effects. All the antipsychotics are obscenely over-prescribed and highly dangerous. In fact, the same is true of all the psychiatric drugs that aren't completely ineffective, and some that are.
Yes the promoter's site shows that it's a total scam. The paper on laser fission of thorium that you linked to shows it's at least a factor of a billion away from break-even.
Well, maybe you can't make an nuclear reaction just by hitting it with a laser. (I'd try a beryllium hammer, first, personally.) But with a sufficient supply of weapons-grade stupidity, plus some nuclear materials, one can certainly make lots of neutrons really, really fast. Adding some lasers could only make the conversion of stupidity into neutrons more efficient..
(Link is to 158 page pdf "Review of Criticality Accidents" Los Alamos, 2000 / a.k.a "Stupid Reactor Tricks", but also processing plant disasters, experiments gone horribly wrong, etc.)
Thanks, I'll take a look at the census data. I was working from the IRS data at: SOI Tax Stats - Individual Time Series Statistical Tables, but some data for more recent years is also available in more difficult to use form at: SOI Tax Stats - Individual Statistical Tables by Size of Adjusted Gross Income. The IRS data has categories on higher levels of income than the census data, and this allows seeing just how concentrated income really is at the top. For instance, nearly 1/6 of all income in 2007 went tho the 0.28% making over $1M per year.
Here is the 2007 IRS data, with "share" defined as "Share of total income divided by percentage of population". An equal share = 1. Also shown is the percentage of households falling into each category.
Income - % of Population - Share .3.25% . 0.16 .. .2.44% . 4.73 .. .. 0.46% . 11.16 .. .. 0.12% . 19.86 .. .. 0.05% . 28.33 .. .. . 0.076% . 49.17 .. . . 0.02% . 112.68 .. .. .. 0.013% . 502.49
$5,000 under $7,000 . . 3.38% . 0.1
$7,000 under $9,000 . . 3.47% . 0.13
$9,000 under $11,000 .
$11,000 under $13,000 . 3.37% . 0.2
$13,000 under $15,000 . 3.33% . 0.23
$15,000 under $17,000 . 3.18% . 0.26
$17,000 under $19,000 . 3.04% . 0.3
$19,000 under $22,000 . 4.42% . 0.34
$22,000 under $25,000 . 4.06% . 0.39
$25,000 under $30,000 . 6.30% . 0.45
$30,000 under $40,000 . 10.31%. 0.57
$40,000 under $50,000 . 7.80% . 0.74
$50,000 under $75,000 . 13.60%. 1.01
$75,000 under $100K . . 8.21% . 1.42
$100K under $200K . . . 9.41% . 2.19
$200K under $500K .
$500K under $1M .
$1M under $1.5M .
$1.5M under $2M .
$2M under $5M .
$5M under $10M .
$10M or more .
(The % of all income earned by each category can be found by multiplying the two numbers together.)
Another interesting statistic is that those making over $1M make nearly as much as everybody earning under $40K combined. (That's 57% of the population making about the same as 0.28% of the population).
While inflation supposedly has been low (I'd say it has been understated at least 1-2% during this period to make GDP growth appear positive and keep government cost-of-living-adjustment expenses down), even using the official numbers that's compounded so that a 2002 dollar is worth over $1.25 today. If the inflation figures are too low by 1.5%, its more like $1.43. Inflation for the rich has likely been higher than for other segments of the population - for instance, boarding schools have quadrupled tuition over a period when the CPI only doubled (since the late '80s).
So using the official figures, $100K today is $79.7K in 2002. That is a big enough difference that eyeballing the figures is not going to work. The problem is that the categories themselves are what needs to be adjusted for inflation, while the available figures are categorized by nominal dollar earnings, so it's hard to compare across years. The Census data also shows the cutoff earnings for each quintile over time, and these can be inflation-adjusted. Here's a graph of that. In inflation adjusted terms, essentially all the real increase in earnings over the past 40 years has gone to the top 20%, virtually all of it to the top 5%. (That's in dollars. In percents things look more even, but that's an illusion.) The bottom 20% have seen shrinking / flat real earnings for several decades. Many people will rise over time in the distribution, but on average the lower you start, the lower you end up, and the more quickly income gains will tend to stop. With
For more recent figures (2007) 3.22% of the returns (AGI over $200,000) made 40.39% of the total income and paid 54.65% of the Federal income tax. But this does not count Social Security or Medicare taxes, nor does it count State taxes. These latter are regressive taxes.
Estimating these as above, the $200,000+ club made about 29% of the after-tax income and had a total tax burden in the neighborhood of 43%, compared to an average for the whole population of about 35%. This doesn't seem unduly high, especially if any allowance is made for subsistence, as in my post above. (And nearly 97% of the population made less than $200K, so that group has little effect on the overall figures.) The total tax burden number for the category of "$200K+" is pulled down somewhat by those making over $10M, who paid only 40% on average.
More than half of all federal income tax (55%) comes from those making $50-500K. (Again, this ignores, Social Security contributions, which almost all come from those making less than $100K -SS is a flat 12.4% tax with a cap at $107K; less than 13% of returns are above $100K. These SS receipts were $784.9B in 2007, vs. total income tax receipts of $1116B). Once we add that in, we see that about 56% of the taxes are paid by those making less than $100K, a group that only earns around a 47% share of the income.
I actually did the calculations using the IRS numbers. I also tried to adjust for Social Security taxes (both sides = 12.4% on the first $107K), Medicare (2.9%) and State taxes. The latter varies wildly depending on the state, but a good rough estimate overall is 10% on the first 100K (mostly sales tax, excise tax and misc. fees) and 5% on income after the first $100K (mostly income and property tax). Note that the rich still pay 10% state tax on the first $100K. This drop in effective taxes occurs because consumption and thus sales taxes are lower as a percentage of income in higher income groups, they are more likely to be able to avoid taxes by buying non-food expenditures on the Internet or while traveling, they are more likely to move to low or no-income-tax states. Even without the state tax approximation, or making a flat or progressive approximation, the qualitative results are the same.
By dividing the average AGI for each category by the estimated after-tax income and subtracting the result from 1 we get the effective tax rates:
(add 1 to 5% to percentages above $100K if you don't buy the state tax calculation)
Total average tax rate: 34.89%
No adjusted gross income [1] 100.00%
$1 under $1,000 25.31%
$1,000 under $3,000 25.58%
$3,000 under $5,000 25.52%
$5,000 under $7,000 25.70%
$7,000 under $9,000 25.85%
$9,000 under $11,000 26.01%
$11,000 under $13,000 26.36%
$13,000 under $15,000 26.60%
$15,000 under $17,000 26.84%
$17,000 under $19,000 27.12%
$19,000 under $22,000 27.52%
$22,000 under $25,000 27.87%
$25,000 under $30,000 28.40%
$30,000 under $40,000 29.36%
$40,000 under $50,000 30.31%
$50,000 under $75,000 31.35%
$75,000 under $100,000 32.21%
$100,000 under $200,000 34.83%
$200,000 under $500,000 39.90%
$500,000 under $1,000,000 42.76%
$1,000,000 under $1,500,000 43.29%
$1,500,000 under $2,000,000 43.31%
$2,000,000 under $5,000,000 43.15%
$5,000,000 under $10,000,000 42.36%
$10,000,000 or more 40.04%
[1]These people had negative income but still paid income tax, and presumably other taxes as well - the nominal rate was set at 100%, though it is really infinite.
But if we subtract a nominal $10K from the average gross earnings in each category to represent a minimal after-tax budget for essentials such as food and shelter:
Total tax burden after paying for essentials:
Total 51.35%
No adjusted gross income [1] 100.00%
$1 under $1,000 1935.57%
$1,000 under $3,000 523.62%
$3,000 under $5,000 276.33%
$5,000 under $7,000 192.67%
$7,000 under $9,000 150.84%
$9,000 under $11,000 125.98%
$11,000 under $13,000 109.77%
$13,000 under $15,000 98.06%
$15,000 under $17,000 89.41%
$17,000 under $19,000 82.67%
$19,000 under $22,000 76.34%
$22,000 under $25,000 70.44%
$25,000 under $30,000 64.82%
$30,000 under $40,000 58.10%
$40,000 under $50,000 52.64%
$50,000 under $75,000 47.62%
$75,000 under $100,000 43.78%
$100,000 under $200,000 42.33%
$200,000 under $500,000 43.38%
$500,000 under $1,000,000 44.23%
$1,000,000 under $1,500,000 44.12%
$1,500,000 under $2,000,000 43.89%
$2,000,000 under $5,000,000 43.48%
$5,000,000 under $10,000,000 42.51%
$10,000,000 or more 40.08%
You would have to reduce the budget for essentials to less than $5300 before a family making $40-50K (mean $44.8K AGI) would not be paying a higher tax rate than one making $200-500K (mean $288K).
No, when you add the obligations for pensions and so forth in the manner that businesses are required to do, the debt is about five times the usually quoted number, $70-80T. The ~$15T is just the bonds.
Also $2.1T is a lot of income. That's about the combined take-home pay of 2/3 - 4/5 of the nation.
(2007 IRS figures: 65% of returns had AGI below $50,000. The total AGI for these, not counting those with negative AGI, was $1.947T, or about $1.38T after Federal and State taxes, including SS, Medicare, and sales tax. The combined take-home pay for those making under $75K AGI (79% of all returns) was only about $2.21T. 2007 figures are the latest non-preliminary figures at hand.)
Well, the worst ones never came near Fannie and Freddie, they were insured by CDOs sold by AIG, who never put aside any money when it sold the CDOs. The toxic mortgage fractions bundled with AIG CDOs somehow became AAA securities. Goldman Sachs (a.k.a. "the vampire squid", "the Treasury", the "regulators", and "your masters") had bought a lot of those CDOs, so AIG got bailed out.
"regardless of the math, S&P's reasoning is sound. let's not try to find scapegoats, please. the U.S. is hurtling at full speed towards a deficit meltdown, and quibbling over S&P's math doesn't change the fact that the country needs to come to terms with it ASAP."
True. Arguing over $2T is silly (i.e. whether the tax cuts will be allowed to expire, an eventuality less likely than default itself, if one factors in the likelihood of failure to pay Social Security obligations in the near term - and don't forget SS is the biggest bondholder). The debt, calculated according to GAAP standards is between $70-80T, not ~$15T. The US debt is not only higher than US GDP, but higher than WORLD GDP. The only way out is inflation and monetizing the debt. The Fed is the only buyer for the debt, anyway, might as well admit it. Stop shoveling the stimulus funds to the banks to act as straw buyers for the debt, do it directly, cut the banks off from the tit and they'll be forced to start making loans to the public if they want to have any earnings. (And if they balk, mark their crummy assets to market and shut them down.)
Cutting federal expenditures could be of some help in cases where the activity being paid for is sufficiently harmful (e.g. stupid weapons systems, stupid wars), but serious cuts in most of the budget would actually hurt the economy - more unemployment, less demand, lower GDP. Redirecting spending to areas with the most positive leverage is a more responsible way to go - startups, manufacturing, infrastructure. Other high-payoff programs: food stamps and condemnation and subsidized rental of foreclosed but untitled properties and unmaintained bank-owned properties. We need to grow the tax base, and that means industrial and trade policy, intelligent tariffs, corporate tax rules that favor repatriation of profits and domestic production. It means raising taxes and closing loopholes so that investors have to scramble to make a profit. (Don't worry, you can still deduct your payroll from your taxable profit. But most of the other deductions need to go away, including payment of corporate officers over twice the median wage.)
I love your comment and I'm a huge fan of John Taylor Gatto.
But I gotta say: if your driving is more lethal than small firearms YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. ;)
(Tip: shoot for the center of mass.
"Even in sciences and engineering, the person who can communicate their ideas clearly and persuasively in writing will have a big edge over one who has similar technical skills but can't write well."
No, rather:
Even in sciences and engineering, the person who communicates his ideas clearly will have a big handicap over someone who has similar technical skills but is willing to write incomprehensible (but presumably deep) buzzword-raddled bullshit.
Well, I can't say what you meant by that post, but one (undoubtedly privileged) construction of what I think I thought you thought you meant was: Oog! Thumpa Thumpa! me big intellectual literary critic! You beta critic! Me get all the hairy-legged deconstructionist poontang! Of all constructions of nominal sexuality!
Not after paying for essentials. Not when counting all taxes - state, sales, excise, social security, and medicare, let alone the kickbacks the rich get from government, not even counting the bailouts they alone got, bailouts for the rich which I estimate were more than the bottom third of Americans were paid in the whole history of America. Hell, the rich and their instruments, the corporations, take over $200B in tax deductions after deducting everything you could think think of: salaries, depreciation, all costs, rents, taxes- after all that, and after all the fraudulent accounting, it's still over $200B per year, just in miscellaneous tax deductions.
And even if the rich did pay most taxes - so what? Compared to the fraction of the disposable national income they command - not through worth, but through theft, fraud and power - they do not even pay their share. Let them move to China, where they sent our manufacturing, if they think they are so poorly treated here. Let their jesters and fools from the Chicago school soothe them as they are wrongfully deprived of their rightful computer bookeeping entries, these mighty who shuffled paper and pulled strings, these bland scions, these New York hustlers, these half-witted MBAs and their mouthpieces ,these parasites who stole the nation, who disinherited and disposessed and destroyed the wealth and dignity of America, the birthright of all those real workers who made and moved and created for a living.
"'do I oppose the fractional reserve system, whereby banks can, as an example, lend $100 for each $10 in deposits they take in', my answer would be no, I'm not opposed to that."
Then you are in favor of allowing fraud for privileged cronies of the money cartel. (Fractional reserves could make sense if 10-year deposits were matched by a proportional amount of 10-year loans, but that's not what happens. All deposits, including demand deposits go into a sweep account. Which used to matter before the Fed started giving out free money and the banks started charging interest on deposits while refuing to loan money for any constructive purpose.)
"I'm most certainly opposed to bailouts of any sort"
Then you are opposed to the existence of most of the major banks and financial firms. They would have gone out of business without the bailouts. You are opposed to allowing the Fed to set rates, to giving its favored members unlimited access to loans at near-zero interest. Thus you are opposed to allowing the present shareholders of those firms to keep their entirely bailout-derived wealth , and all the secondary beneficiaries to keep that portion of their holdings that is due to the bailouts. Right? No, you are lying. You will undoubtedly claim that whoever holds wealth is presumptively entitled to it. You think that the Brit aristocrats are entitled to the land they seized via the enclosure acts, that the American farmers hold land according to the deeds in the county offices, (despite what any Indian treaties might say), that the Israeli land titles are good (despite whatever the Ottoman records say), that the banks' titles are good (despite the securitization, fraudulent selling of the same mortgage multiple times, lack of registration of titles, evasion of legal requirements, mass forgery of documents etc. etc.). No, all the wealth coming from that is due to pluck and initiative, just like all the wealth from hedge funds taxed at 15% ( half of the effective tax rate of a secretary), just like all the other wealth due to "investment" of other people's money on a "heads I win, tails you lose" basis.
"I'm about as far removed from supporting welfare of any sort, corporate included." No doubt excepting the entire "defense" budget. And the wonderful profits that the oil companies got from keeping the Iraqi oil off the market. And all the corporate "intellectual property" due to public funding of research, given away free. And the student loans, not dischargable in bankruptcy, yet guaranteed by the government that have so enriched the banks. And the insurance company giveaways too numerous to recount.
No, you're going to be against honoring the obligations of Social Security and Medicare, insurance programs that ordinary people paid for, that have always run yearly surpluses, that the rich did not pay for (at least on SS over present-equivalent earnings over ~100K - a regressive tax), which were looted to pay for corporate welfare to war profiteers. Got it. Contracts are sacred, except for those with poor and middle-class people forced at the barrel of a gun to buy insurance. Only those who take government money to ship the economy to China are really independent businessmen worthy of our respect and exemptions from all taxes (well, also those who offer private prisons at public expense, literally enslaving prisoners whose "crimes" were created by endless lobbying by the prison owners, they deserve not only the prisoners' labor for free to sell as they wish in competition with the taxpaying workers (not yet officially claimed as serfs), but the prison owners also deserve a subsidy, and lots of tax breaks, and immunity from lawsuits. Well no act of Congress will make those prison owners immune to the massive trauma they deserve, and will in time receive. And the same is true of those who, like you, are shills for this violent expropriation.)
Unless you are an anonymous parasitic management shill and you are surrounded by those who actually work for a living.
"in the end it's the same except employers can't get out of it"
There you go.
Insightful, not flamebait.
The employees have always paid 100% of their healthcare and their pensions, and 100% of the corporations' profits. Everything the shareholders and the management have ever taken has been the fruits of the employees' work.
You are on the side of inhuman collectives, corporations, artificial legal creatures spawned by government for the express purpose of avoiding responsibility. Your talking points are noise. When the citizenry no longer makes enough to buy the crap for which your patrons shipped manufacturing offshore, (i.e. now) then their sales will plummet even as they cut employment. Your masters have cut their own throats.
Your sort aren't really in favor of open markets or competition - as J.P. Morgan said: "competition is a sin." You put out your Chicago-school free-market propaganda, but you don't really want competition, only Fed and government-backed oligarchy. You have never really read Adam Smith, you couldn't distinguish between comparative and absolute advantage in the real world if your quarterly results depended on it. You don't even know Ricardo's "Iron Law of Wages", let alone the rest of Ricardo, or any of the assumptions that the big-name economists that you like to cite (if only when backed into a corner) made. You're a poseur, your opinions are all third-hand, you know nothing, and are worth even less.
If you object to collective bargaining by workers, then presumably you object to collective bargaining by capital - that is, the management representatives of banks fraudulently lending out 20x the money they ultimately got either from workers or their private, government-backed cartel, the Federal Reserve. Collective, Soviet-style capital, totalitarian fiefs backstopped with multi-trillion-dollar bailouts from the supposed people's government because they threatened to fly the economy straight into the ground?
Quit trolling, asswipe. We don't need any filching, scum-licking apologists for the inhuman parasitic corporate welfare class you whore for here.