JayB

The cheering doesn't bother me a bit, because I recognize that there's a difference between expressing jubilation over the slaughter of thousands of innocent people...and people expressing jubilation over the killing of the man who orchestrated the killing of thousands of innocent people.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner or as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final total catastrophe of the currency involved." -Ludwig Von Mises

Having lived in Mass for three long years, I admit to being quite surprised to year that the Democratic members of the legislature are of the DLC type. I'm also quite astonished to learn that they've been mercilessly squeezing public sector workers there in pursuit of cost-efficient operations with an eye to maximizing the services that taxpayers there get for their money. To take but one small example, consider the Mass Turnpike: http://www.tollroadsnews.com/node/3961

Oh wait... "Pop quiz: What political party, in what state, this week passed a bill in the dead of night stripping public-sector unions of their collective- bargaining powers? Republicans in Wisconsin? The GOP in Ohio or Indiana? Try Democrats in Massachusetts..." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704463804576291240909536676.html If there was ever a claque of inbred, cousin-humping, bible-thumping fundamentalist Redneck regressives who hate public sector workers elected anywhere, it's the members of the Democratic majority in the Mass legistlature...

Also - Looks like there's a glitch or two in the list: If you want to vote for Jay Kerr's Ruth Gorge TR (see link below), then click on the last "X" button. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/921453/TR_West_Fork_Ruth_Huntington_E#Post921453

Well, what can I say - we're going with evolution instead of intelligent design on this one. We started with a different plan, but we've decided to put every TR nominated in both of the threads in a poll to settle this one and determine who gets the prizes. (Reminder: Grand Prize winner gets a $500 gift certificate to Pro Mountain Sports). If you've submitted a vote before - click a button here on the poll and vote again. Sorry for the repetition, but at least voting again won't take too much additional effort. If you haven't voted before - grab a beer and scroll through this anthology of great TR's and choose your favorite. Thanks to everyone who took the time to make a vote/nomination in the previous threads.

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Crazy whipped-cream snow formations on the slopes above Snow Lake on Saturday....

Bronco and I were the first party in the basin on Saturday, but we were slowed down considerably by the icy breakable crust (should have brought ski crampons!) we encountered on the slopes leading up to the basin. We'd sort of informally decided that if we didn't think we could be descending by 10:00 AM at the latest, we'd pull the plug. Between our pitifully slow pace on the approach, the rising temps, the bright sunshine blasting everything, the insane cornices overhanging the descent route, etc - we wussed out, exited via the ridge to the climber's right, ate lunch in the sunshine, and chilled until the crust softened up enough for pleasant turns on the way down. Beautiful day to be out. Interesting to see folks just starting on the route when you guys were completing your descent, since when we bailed at 10:00 it looked like both parties were still fairly low on the route. See above for state of the cornices. Massive cornice overhanging the North Face route as well.

I remember that TR, and that picture in particular. There's something really powerful about that image. You can feel the weight of the cold through the monitor, some of the last shards of sunlight in the lower 48 are retreating from the summit, and night is closing in. Then there's that *one* guy alone in the middle of it all, leaning towards the summit and punching steps, 'teeth in the wind.'

Damn. Very sad.

Just to touch on the theme of income inequality - how much is real and how much is a statistical artifact based in changes to the tax code that determine how income is reported? "The first thing to note about the post-1980 increase is the large jump from 1986 to 1988. Piketty and Saez's IRS estimates are based on individual income tax returns, and they are therefore sensitive to tax law changes that affect what gets reported on these returns and when. A long line of research notes that the Tax Reform Act of 1986, by lowering top marginal income tax rates below corporate tax rates caused a decline in income reported by "taxable corporations" (on corporate tax returns) and a corresponding rise in income reported by "Subchapter S" corporations (on individual income tax returns). This represents pure and simple shifting of where large incomes are reported, from one type of tax form to another, but it shows up in the Piketty and Saez data as an increase in income concentration. A similar them emerges when you use "household income." The composition of households has changed over time across all income quintiles, the "household" in one quintile is not equivalent to a household in another quintile, etc, etc. Then when you start discussing actual people and what happens to their incomes over time, instead of statistical aggregates, you complicate the picture still further: Of households in the lowest income quintile in 2001, 28.6% were in a higher quintile in 2003; of those originally in the highest income quintile, 32.1% were in a lower quintile 2 years later. http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p60-235.pdf (p.4)

True, but it would help. We need to cut the budget AND make the tax laws fair. The Obama tax cuts for the rich only will continue to exacerbate the budget horror show we can't seem to stop. This is a great link with facts concerning the vast majority of the population being hosed by the rich I'd like to see Jayb refute. http://wweek.com/portland/article-17350-9_things_the_rich_dont_want_you_to_know_about_taxes.html The federal spending and reach into every little aspect of our lives is still out of control IMO. Raising everyone's taxes might crash the economy, but someone has to grab the tiller and fix this issue soon, or pay the piper later. Cutting government spending should be done as well, if you raise taxes and spend it via big gov't then you haven't done jack or shit except to make things worse. I don't have enough time to respond to everything in the link right now, so I'll have to offer up a few generalizations. 1. Outcomes and intentions are two different things. A tax regime designed to sock it to the wealthy and help the poor may do neither in practice. It's not clear that high marginal rates succeed on either front, particularly after passing through the sausage factory. 2. It's important to compare apples to apples. Wages/salary are different than total compensation. Workers and households are not equivalent statistical categories. Marginal tax rates are not effective tax rates. Tax burden calculations that include the value of transfer payments look way different than those that do include them. Etc, etc, etc.. 3. IMO the ideal tax code is one that optimizes savings, investment, and production. Consumption taxes are way better for that than income taxes. Flat tax rates are better for that than complex, deduction-heavy tax rates. My ideal tax regime would be a progressive consumption tax (tax the difference between total income and total savings) with income indexed transfer payments for the least well off to use for food, shelter, medical expenses, etc. I think Canada is closer to achieving that than we are.

You'd have to actually look at the effect of deductions and income thresholds, not just top marginal rates in order to determine how heavily they tax the incomes of their top deciles or quintiles in practice. Whatever the case may be - they seem to have figured out that they couldn't finance their welfare states simply by sticking it to the rich. Maybe because they can do math? Hence the broad consumption taxes like the VAT, which generate significantly more of their total tax revenue than their income taxes do. High marginal rates on the rich for populist theater, broad consumption taxes on everyone to actually raise money. If they couldn't finance the welfare state in Eurloand with high marginal rates alone, the odds are high that we aren't going to be able to do it here either.

Draw a regression plot on the blue line and it will definitely have a downward slope, the upper line will be flat - add the two up and you still have a line that slopes downwards despite the wild variations in the top marginal rate and the income threshold it applies to. The lesson here should be that since 1950, people with lots of money have proven very adept at shielding their income from taxation when they've had an incentive to do so. It's not clear to me what would everyone thinks would magically change if top marginal rates were increased while we retained all of the exemptions - other than very wealthy people spending more on tax attorneys. What's even more puzzling is all of the erstwhile progressives getting aggro over tax reforms that would actually increase effective tax rates on high incomes via eliminating deductions and dropping marginal rates. The bottom line is that if you want to finance a generous welfare state - you have to make like Willy Sutton and go where the money is - which is the middle of the income range. That's what the Euros do, and they use broad, flat consumption taxes like the VAT to do it. It's also why income taxes constitute a far lower percentage of their total tax take than ours, despite all of the hyperventilating here about how progressive their tax system is vis-a-vis the US. "In 1965, before the VAT spread across the European community, average tax burden of EU15 reached 27.7 percent of the GDP versus 24.7 percent in America. In 2006, the average tax burden for 15 developed European countries reached 39.8 percent. In United States, where VAT has not been introduced, average tax burden in 2006 remained close to the level of 1960s – at 28 percent of the GDP. The immediate consequence of VAT introduction in Europe was a surge in government spending. From 1965 to 2006, average government spending (as a share of the GDP) in the European Union increased by 17 percentage points while in America it increased by 7 percentage points...In 2007, taxes on goods and services presented about 4.7 percent of the US GDP; about three times less the level in Sweden (12.9 percent of the GDP) and four times less the level in Denmark (16.3 percent of the GDP). This whole discussion leaves out any consideration of the dynamic effects of tax rates on long term growth, the long term impact of taxing income vs consumption on savings, investment, and production, etc...

I'm going to discredit both Tvash and Carl by agreeing with them on this one.

That's because you didn't include WW2 in your data: http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205 marginal rates (your site) http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php tax revenue as 20.9% of GDP in 1944, up from 13.3% of GDP in 1943. Marginal rate went from 88% to 94%. You'll also notice how far the top bracket fell in that time period as well. Similar occured earlier in the century when the top bracket went from 7% to 77% in 3 years I realize though that "facts" are uncomfortably at odds with your ideology. If the relationship between top marginal rates and revenues is a simple function of marginal rates and income thresholds then every cut in top marginal rates should result in a proportionate reduction in tax revenues, and should never lead to an increase - right? There's a reason that the Euro's like broad consumption taxes in addition to high marginal rates, because they figured out that there's not enough aggregated income in whatever income threshold they deem wealthy to cover the bills.

People I know have had good experiences with Jim Mates: http://www.customboot.8m.com/ There's a few reviews that pop up if you Google his name. http://www.epicski.com/forum/thread/100886/trip-report-jim-mates-custom-boots

Can you point to the spike in revenues under policy conditions that best approximate that set of policies? There is a flaw in that plot. The top marginal rate has not always been set for the same salary - even normalizing for inflation. For example the 90% of the past may have applied to someone making $1,000,000 in today's dollars, but the 35% rate applies to those making, say, more than $250,000. That's true - but the plot showing federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP includes revenues from all sources, so all you can tell from the plot is that there's never been a time when taxing whoever happens to be defined as rich enough to pay at the top marginal rate generated a significant increase in Uncle Sam's revenue as a share of GDP. As you indicated - no magic bullet. As far as I know the Euro states generate less revenue as a share of GDP from income taxes, even though their marginal rates are higher, and manage to capture a higher percentage of GDP in tax revenues than we do through the use of broad consumption taxes that hit everyone, like the VAT, etc...e.g. "regressive" taxation mechanisms. Historical top marginal rates and income thresholds here for those that are curious: http://www.truthandpolitics.org/top-rates.php

Can you point to the spike in revenues under policy conditions that best approximate that set of policies?

The point of the article is that increasing the top marginal rates isn't a very effective way of increasing the amount of taxes that the wealthiest 10% of Americans *actually* pay. Top marginal rates at 90% or more were great political theater, but the data shows that they weren't very good at increasing revenue or the effective tax rate. If you want to increase the effective tax rate over the long term (e.g. the percentage of their total income that they actually pay in taxes every year), the most effective way to do that is lower marginal rates and eliminate deductions, loopholes, etc. It's been done before. Take a look at the tax reforms of 1986.

"It is not as though we have never tried high tax rates before. From 1951 to 1963, the lowest tax rate was 20% to 22% and the highest was 91% to 92%. The top capital gains tax rate approached 40% in 1976-77. Aside from cyclical swings, however, the ratio of individual income tax receipts to GDP has always remained about 8% of GDP. The individual income tax brought in 7.8% of GDP from 1952 to 1979 when the top tax rate ranged from 70% to 92%, 8% of GDP from 1993 to 1996 when the top tax rate was 39.6%, and 8.1% from 1988 to 1990 when the highest individual income tax rate was 28%. Mr. Obama's hope that raising only the highest tax rates could keep individual tax receipts well above 9% of GDP has been repeatedly tested for more than six decades. It has always failed. Federal revenue from the individual income tax exceeded 9% of GDP only eight times in U.S. history—during World War II (9.4% in 1944), the recessions of 1969-70, 1981-82 and 1991-92, and the tech-stock boom-bust of 1998-2001. Revenues were a high share of GDP during the three recessions because GDP fell. The situation of 1997-2000 was unique. Individual income tax revenues reached an unprecedented 9.6% of GDP from 1997 to 2000 for reasons quite unlikely to be repeated. An astonishing quintupling of Nasdaq stock prices coincided with an extraordinary proliferation of stock options, which the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances found were granted to 11% of U.S. families by 2001, and with a reduction in the capital gains tax to 20% from 28%, which encouraged much greater realization of taxable gains through stock sales. Revenues from the capital gains tax rose to 10.8% of all individual income tax receipts in 1997 and 13% by 2000. The unexpected revenue windfalls in President Bill Clinton's second term were largely a consequence of lower tax rates on capital gains. Using IRS data, Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley have estimated that realized capital gains accounted for just 13%-22% of reported income among the top 1% of taxpayers from 1988 to 2006, when gains were taxed at 28%—but that fraction swiftly reached 29%-32% in 1998-2000, when the capital gains tax fell to 20%. The average tax rate of such top taxpayers was mechanically diluted by the greatly increased realizations of capital gains after 1997 and 2003, since a larger share of reported income consisted of capital gains. Yet the amount of taxes paid by top taxpayers reached record highs for the same reason—there was more revenue to be had from taxing many gains at a low rate than from taxing fewer gains a high rate." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576257261171406994.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Interesting since it seems the rich have just as much trouble (if not more) "keeping their families together". that might be true, but that's generally more b/c they can afford 6k$/day coke habits? don't think the rich folks family problems revolve so much around keeping their kids in health insurance, w/ a roof over their heads, in a decent school, etc. etc. Would be interesting to compare the experiences of various poor immigrant groups with just as little money as the "native" poor and see how they score on all of the metrics of family dysfunction - divorce, delinquency, dependency, illegitimacy, etc. Willing to bet that household income would explain relatively little of the variance between groups that are equally poor. Interesting for a cyber voyeuristic sociopath with a bigotry issues, perhaps. For the rest of us, not so much. No Data + Ad hominem. Yawn.

Interesting since it seems the rich have just as much trouble (if not more) "keeping their families together". that might be true, but that's generally more b/c they can afford 6k$/day coke habits? don't think the rich folks family problems revolve so much around keeping their kids in health insurance, w/ a roof over their heads, in a decent school, etc. etc. Would be interesting to compare the experiences of various poor immigrant groups with just as little money as the "native" poor and see how they score on all of the metrics of family dysfunction - divorce, delinquency, dependency, illegitimacy, etc. Willing to bet that household income would explain relatively little of the variance between groups that are equally poor.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/signs-point-to-a-severe-housing-correction-in-canada/article1979229/ Playing Carnac: 1)Look for the telltale signs of rising inventories, rising median price, and falling sales volume this summer*, then wait for things to get interesting in 2012. Harper may want to throw this election and let someone else be the bagholder. (*indicates even the most suicidal/retarded borrowers have been priced out of the lower end of the market, while high-end buyers are still in the game but dwindling and or/getting skittish and the sales mix is reflecting a sales mix that's shifted towards fewer high end sales. Classic Wile E Coyote hovering over the end of a cliff moment).