Here in NH, the natives are pretty convinced that our sustaining the highest job and income growth in the NE for decades has a lot to do with our tax climate. Was that the only cause? No, our high education and low crime rate may have had a lot to do with that as well. Or all three may be related. Unfortunately, a lot of the folks who moved in thought that the job they came up to fill had appeared by magic, created by the government. Now we’ve gone blue and gone broke.

I have the not-terribly-brilliant notion that in very complex systems formed of millions of independently acting individuals, it’s very difficult to tease out the effect of some single action independently of anything else, and so as I said, we fall back to believing our pet theories and discounting the others. Hence Neo’s “a mind is a difficult thing to change”.

Oh, and continuing to believe in pet theories is the most sustainable thing in human civilization. How else do you explain the groups of hundreds of millions of individuals who believe in mutually contradictory religions?

I don’t note that the incomes are adjusted for inflation in that data. Maybe I just missed it. The graph with diamond points also does not show many years after the tax change, leaving insufficient data for conclusions. They make a point. It may have something to it. But it looks suspiciously soft – advocacy numbers rather than discussion numbers.

Mrs Whatsit – I was nodding my head reading your comment. The farce that is NY legislature is to be seen to be believed – if you’re unfamiliar with the way this city’s government agencies work. Then you’d know there is very little difference. Their goal is to staff their own particular cushion they are sitting on, producing as bigger smokescreen with rhetoric as possible, and manipulating public with speeches that seem to be beneficial at the moment. Yesterday Paterson found it expedient to bloviate about racism, today he changed his spiel into something that seems reasonable (lower the taxes on the rich!) – but I have no doubt if tomorrow he smelled that his own reelection chances were better served by advocating for higher taxes, he’d turn 360deg and not even blink.

While governments (state and federal) talk about “creating jobs”, as if they are the ones who do, and tax the real creators till they bleed, we’re in the deep doodoo.

“Just to tip the topic back toward New York for a moment, it’ll be interesting to see just who pays what price as elections roll around. New Yorkers are, pretty much unanimously, furious with the legislature,…At this point you could pick out almost any random New York citizen on the street and ask them who they’re planning to vote for next time around and they will tell you, “Whoever’s running against an incumbent!”

Then you observe, “Patterson is deeply unpopular, at least in some small part because he’s been trying to speak truth about the budget to a state full of people who don’t want to hear it.”

That tells me that NY voters may well vote out of office incumbents but that they will replace them with ideologically similar replacements. Just ones who claim to be able to get things done.

Politicians are the same, leftist politics is easier yet. A collective really is not a bright thing, since it is based on the weakest links or the lowest common denominator, it is easy to peg. Though it can be counter intuitive, sometimes by design, sometimes because they are the intellectual equivalent of visual fugliness.

excellent beacuse he is thinking about all the other outcomes of the actions, not just the ones down the middle. and ALL outcomes are part of an assesment and are in play wheteher you want to recognize them or not, or even if the players realize.

this is the area of the meta analysis, where the elite operate moer often than the center road. if they were magicians this would be their left hand doing something while their right hand plays your game of argument to no end.

in this way, you always present the same old arguments to keep the average person in thrall and in circles but the goals are being accomplished as second order actions.

so abortion is about womens choices and such, and that goes round and round without resolution (they wont let it be resolved any way but their way). meanwhile the whole thing is about eugenics when you consider it in conjunctions with polciies as a whole, and distributino. (africans are less than 20 percent of the population but their neighborhoods have 4 times the number of clinics. and the same pimp who creamed acorn was showing that they take donations to help black women abort their children (and spanish) as well as to export it to other countries, were the effect is 100% towards another race)

and you can also note that such side revealing of the conversation is not PC. so they wont let it into the conversation to preserve the circular track to keep material (us) doing what they want (the real definitino of materialism).