Raising the tax rate versus raising the effective tax rate

The New Neo Posted on by

Raising the tax rate is not the same as raising the amount of tax money collected, either in the aggregate or from a selected group such as “the rich.”

Even a non-accountant non-economist like me knows that. Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? (excerpts are from an interview she gave on “60 Minutes”):

Anderson Cooper: You’re talking about zero carbon emissions — no use of fossil fuels within 12 years.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: That is the goal. It’s ambitious. And…

Anderson Cooper: How is that possible? Are you talking about everybody having to drive an electric car?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?

Anderson Cooper: This would require, though, raising taxes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There’s an element where— yeah. There— people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes.

Anderson Cooper: Do you have a specific on the tax rate?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You know, it— you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system. Your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops —- on your 10 millionth dollar -— sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.

At the moment I can’t find a transcript of the entire interview, but my guess is that Cooper didn’t follow up with a question about effective tax rates back then, and the existence of so many loopholes and tax shelters at the time that the actual rate paid was much much lower. Would Ocasio-Cortez support the return of the shelters and loopholes that made it that way? I doubt it; that wouldn’t feed the hungry beast of leftist desire to punish the rich—those “tippy tops” that remain undefined as to the details of what income qualifies and what a “fair share” is.

We do know who will decide those things, though—the left. And human nature being what it is, plenty of people will cheer them on.

Anyone who’s interested in the actual situation that prevailed in the 50s and 60s might want to take a look at this (just one of many such articles):

There is a common misconception that high-income Americans are not paying much in taxes compared to what they used to. Proponents of this view often point to the 1950s, when the top federal income tax rate was 91 percent for most of the decade.[1] However, despite these high marginal rates, the top 1 percent of taxpayers in the 1950s only paid about 42 percent of their income in taxes. As a result, the tax burden on high-income households today is only slightly lower than what these households faced in the 1950s. [a graph follows]

…The data shows that, between 1950 and 1959, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average of 42.0 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. Since then, the average effective tax rate of the top 1 percent has declined slightly overall. In 2014, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 36.4 percent.

All things considered, this is not a very large change. To put it another way, the average effective tax rate on the 1 percent highest-income households is about 5.6 percentage points lower today than it was in the 1950s. That’s a noticeable change, but not a radical shift.[3]

How could it be that the tax code of the 1950s had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent, but resulted in an effective tax rate of only 42 percent on the wealthiest taxpayers? In fact, the situation is even stranger. The 42.0 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent takes into account all taxes levied by federal, state, and local governments, including: income, payroll, corporate, excise, property, and estate taxes. When we look at income taxes specifically, the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid an average effective rate of only 16.9 percent in income taxes during the 1950s.

There’s more at the link, but I also suggest you read this to get a lot more information on the subject. One of the many points made is that if tax rates are raised to that level on too many people it backfires, and if only a few are effected (one might call them the “tippy tippy tippy top”) it has almost no effect on revenue at all.

Ah, but this is all so hard and complex. It involves math, too. Much better to just ask the rich to pay their fair share—and of course, that won’t include us, right?

[NOTE: See also this from Scott Johnson at Powerline.]

Losing the shutdown standoff, winning the blame game

The New Neo Posted on by

In an article entitled “Why Trump’s Losing the Shutdown Fight—
A simple political rule of thumb: Never hold the government hostage for anything, even if it’s a cherished campaign promise,” Josh Kraushaar writes;

Here’s a simple, time-tested rule of politics: The party that’s divided is the one that’s going to lose a legislative showdown. That lesson should be growing clearer for Republicans…

The GOP has long been more divided than the Democrats, and probably always will be. There are many reasons for that (too numerous to go into in this post), but I think it’s far less of a definitive issue than this one: the party that’s labeled by the MSM as being to blame is most likely to lose a legislative showdown in the minds of the public, because it’s been labeled as being responsible and just plain mean, and that party is the GOP. So whatever the situation and whatever the issue, whichever party controls which branch of government, the GOP is the culprit.

That’s pretty hard to counter—although there’s no question that the divisions in the GOP don’t help at all.

Here’s how I see it. Funding the wall is something Trump must accomplish to save his political life because without it many of his supporters will desert him. Or, alternatively, if he fails to accomplish it, he must at the very least be seen by supporters as having fiercely fought to build the wall and to only have been stopped by the Democrats combined with RINOesque NeverTrumpers.

The Democrats have three big reasons to stand firm as well. The first is the aforementioned support of the MSM and the knowledge that the GOP and/or Trump will be blamed for a shutdown, so the Democrats believe they hold a winning hand even if the partial shutdown continues. Therefore they have no real incentive to end it, just in the tactical sense.

The second is that they really really really don’t want the wall built because they would like as many illegal immigrants to come as possible, because the assumption by Democrats is that the vast majority of the children of those arrivals who are subsequently born in this country will become Democrats (it’s indeed possible that this presumption is correct).

Third but far from least is the fact that the Democrats want Trump to lose not only the shutdown battle but the 2020 election, and they know that keeping him from building the wall is a vital part of that effort. If they can stop him and his base deserts him, they are home free no matter what person they nominate and how far to the left that candidate is.

Or so they believe.

The Righteous Brothers: reaction video

The New Neo Posted on by

Sometimes when I need some relaxing down time, I surf YouTube. A while back in my YouTube explorations, I came across what are known as “reaction videos.” They’re a strange genre in which people often rack up biggish view counts by listening to music (pop singers in particular) and reacting to them in real time, videoing themselves doing so.

It may sound odd—and it is indeed odd. But some of these videos can be hugely entertaining, and many of the practitioners have large followings.

One particular type of reaction video features someone relatively young (young to my way of thinking, anyway) listening to older pop recordings or watching older pop videos for the first time, and reacting to them. Often they seem very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the older music, or something about the singer.

Here’s a guy listening to the Righteous Brothers singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” an old favorite of mine. During the song’s heyday, I never thought about the race of the Brothers, but now I can see what this guy means in his startled reaction. And boy, were the Righteous Brothers ever great!

Enjoy:

A little background on the Righteous Brothers:

Their emotive vocal style is sometimes dubbed “blue-eyed soul”…

…According to Medley [the bass-baritone of the duo], they then adopted the name “The Righteous Brothers” for the duo because black Marines from the El Toro Marine base started calling them “righteous brothers”. At the end of a performance, a black U.S. Marine in the audience would shout, “That was righteous, brothers!”, and would greet them with “Hey righteous brothers, how you doin’?” on meeting them.

Phil Spector was their producer, and they were his first non-black act:

Spector commissioned Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil to write a song for them, which turned out to be “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”. The song, released in late 1964, became their first major hit single and reached No. 1 in February 1965. Produced by Phil Spector, the record is often cited as one of the finest expressions of Spector’s Wall of Sound production techniques. It is one of the most successful pop singles of its time, despite exceeding the then-standard length for radio play. Indeed, according to BMI, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” became the most-played song on American radio and television of the 20th century, with more than eight million airplays by the end of 1999.

Until I read that, I hadn’t known about the extreme popularity of the song. All I knew was that it was very popular with me.

Trump and the Democrats respond to Tlaib’s obscenities

The New Neo Posted on by

An interesting retort from Trump:

“I thought her comments were disgraceful,” Trump said during a White House news conference about the ongoing government shutdown. “This is a person that I don’t know, I assume she’s new. I think she dishonored herself and I think she dishonored her family. Using language like that in front of her son and whoever else was there, I thought that was a great dishonor to her and to her family.”

Trump continued, saying he thought her comments were “highly disrespectful to the United States of America.”

I covered Tlaib’s remarks yesterday here.

Trump’s response is especially fascinating for at least three reasons. The first is that he took the high road, refraining from any response in kind. The second is that he emphasized the concept of dishonor, which would play especially meaningfully in an honor/shame culture such as the one Tlaib’s parents came from (Palestine). The third is that instead of saying that the remarks were disrespectful to Trump himself, he said they were disrespectful to the country, thus taking it out of the realm of possible narcissism and into the more basic arena of respect for the country.

The Democrats’ responses to Tlaib were almost comical in their attempts to thread the needle and blame the whole thing on Trump. That is, it all would be comical if the situation the country’s in weren’t so serious. Here are some of their reactions:

Ms Pelosi on Thursday said while she would not use such language, it was no worse than things Mr Trump has said…

Civil rights icon John Lewis said Ms Tlaib’s comments were “inappropriate” and “distracting”. The Georgia congressman also said talk of impeachment was “a little premature”.

Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said: “What she said yesterday was wrong. Wrong is wrong.”

Jerry Nadler of New York told CNN: “I don’t really like that kind of language, but more to the point it is too early to talk about [impeachment] intelligently.”

Tepid gruel. At any rate, it’s all about impeachment, impeachment, impeachment. I’m not sure they’ll do that, however, rather than just talk incessantly about it.

Of two things I’m virtually sure, though. The first is that Pelosi is constantly monitoring how an impeachment would play politically, and she will act accordingly. And the second is that if she tells Democrats to vote for it, they will vote for it.

It’s not so easy: evaluating political consequences and voting accordingly

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “F” writes:

The thing about identity politics that always confuses me is why Democrats are able to benefit from it. They have the black vote in Chicago, for example, but are black Chicagoans better off after having voted D for decades? It would not appear that way. And we have all heard what the minority unemployment figures are under Trump — better than they’ve ever been, in some cases. But the Democrats still took the House. I just don’t get it.

Good point. And then F answers his/her own question, at least partially:

Saying you care is worth more votes than showing through policies that you care.

So I’ll just expand a bit more on the reasons I think this happens.

The conservative message is rather like a “tough-love” one. It doesn’t sell all that well, because it asks people to forego easy, quick solutions for longer-term ones that might require some sacrifice. Human nature is such that this isn’t necessarily convincing.

But it’s especially unconvincing because of the modern tendency towards imagology, something I’ve discussed several times before. To refresh your memory, here’s a quote from the Czech author Milan Kundera describing the phenomenon:

…[I]magology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed.

Imagology has become especially strong, and cause-and-effect in politics is difficult to discern in terms of evaluating the policies of a given party. We all know how much arguing goes on, for example, about whether a certain president (pick a president, any president) is responsible for either a good or bad economy during his administration. It’s neither easy nor simple to figure out, although we try to simplify it, and statistics can usually be used to bolster either side of the argument.

Of course, a lot of people neither read the statistics nor understand them. But even for those who do, the situation is often murky. That leaves a lot of room—a lot of room—for propaganda and for confirmation bias.

Then we have political habit and tradition. If a person is surrounded by friends and family and newspapers that espouse one particular view, and has been since birth—for example, in many urban areas that means the liberal point of view—it takes an awful lot to strike out on one’s own and disagree, changing points of view and party. I’ve dedicated a lot of verbiage to that very topic (see this as well as this). And it’s not gotten easier over time to leave the circle, now that political polarization has reached a fever pitch.

The changing way to buy groceries

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was a child my mother didn’t have to go out all that much to shop for food. For the most part, the food came to her.

There was bread delivery, milk delivery, fruit and vegetable delivery, and meat and fish delivery, and it was regular—some of it on weekly order and some by phone. I’m not sure how she paid; I’m assuming they sent bills that she paid with cash or check. The supermarket—there was only one anywhere near us, and I remember when it was built—was for a few items now and then, such as cereal and canned goods. We even had paper products and soda delivered, although I’m not sure that was commonplace among our neighbors.

By the time I was doing my own shopping, trips to the supermarket were frequent and I can’t remember any deliveries at all. I paid with cash or check, and when I gave the clerk a check there was a long process of looking at my ID and writing things down, and it had to be a local check and a local ID.

Then came credit cards, which initially were phoned in, with a wait that could be quite long. I’m not even sure whether at that point credit cards were used in supermarkets or were confined to other retail establishments unlikely to have such long lines. Remember those little machines that the clerk operated, that made an imprint of the raised figures on the card?

And of course you had to sign the credit slip, no matter what the amount.

Then the sliding of the card on the side of a small machine fixed so that the customer had easy access, and now we have chips. Unless the amount is high, no signing. And the computers of the world know your buying history from way way back.

Apparently there’s delivery again, too. I prefer to walk the aisles and look at things and people, but you can also have all sorts of services that deliver prepared meals that cater to your food preferences and diet needs.

What might be next?

When it’s Democrats talking trash, they’re just “passionate”

The New Neo Posted on by

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

One of our newly-sworn-in members of Congress has covered herself with glory:

New Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) started her term with a bang as she cursed out President Donald Trump in a speech to supporters. From Fox News:

Speaking to a crowd of supporters Thursday night, the Michigan Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress said of Trump: “People love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t, because we’re gonna go in there and we’re gonna impeach the mother***er.’”

…

Not to mention the fact that Tlaib had anti-Semitic racist Linda Sarsour with her at her swearing-in. You know, the woman who loves Louis Farrakhan and terrorist Rasmea Odeh.

Tlaib is in a safe Democratic district, and she has the honor of being one of the first “two Muslim women elected to Congress…and the first Palestinian-American woman in Congress. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.”

Tlaib is the eldest of fourteen children of Palestinian immigrants to this country. She was born and raised in Detroit.

Tlaib’s statement has not met with condemnation by the Democrats in power, which should come as no surprise. It has been labeled (“reframed,” as they say in the family therapy biz) as “passionate.”

[NOTE: I will point out that although Tlaib ran as a Democrat, she is a “Democratic Socialist,” which is in itself a reframe of “socialist.”]

White people and the Democratic Party

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Concept Junkie” makes this interesting point about identity politics and today’s Democratic Party:

I think the Democrats have put themselves in a box in that they’d look like hypocrites nominating a white male. This limits their list of qualified candidates significantly. Oh, wait, “qualified” is rarely a consideration. Regardless, by becoming the anti-white and anti-male party, they are hurting themselves.

That got me to wondering whether it’s true.

Actually, I believe that the Democrats would have no trouble nominating a white male if they chose to do so—although I also doubt they’ll choose to do so. But if they did, they’d just re-label him a non-white male, as they’ve somehow been doing with Beto O’Rourke. Alternatively, they’ll just point out how he’s a “woke” white male who has renounced and/or confessed to his white male privilege and is atoning for it by running on a platform of championing diversity and undoing that privilege by which he’s benefited.

It’s not that difficult, really—and, as I pointed out in this post, Democratic voters don’t have much trouble with hypocrites: the left is all about holding power and getting “progressive” things done and saying what is necessary to do so.

What about Concept Junkie’s second point, that the Democrats have hurt themselves by positioning themselves as anti-white and anti-male? I wonder; I’m just not sure.

Even prior to their overt embrace of anti-white-male rhetoric, Democrats had a lock on the black vote and to a great extent the Hispanic vote. I doubt that their stance on white males would impact that negatively. Nor has it seemed to have had much (or any) negative effect on the Jewish vote—the Democratic segment of which is about 2/3 of the total Jewish vote and consists to a large extent of secular Jews (although Jews are such a small group they hardly matter in terms of numbers, but they do form a disproportionate percentage of donors to the Democratic Party).

There are a bunch of charts at this link illustrating the changes in voter patterns from the 80s till now based on demographics. It’s quite informative. In general, the leftward/Democratic trend in most groups has been pretty strong in all groups, although men in each group are consistently less left than women, even among fairly monolithically Democratic groups such as black voters. The only group solidly to the right (men and women, although men more so) are whites. And whites are a smaller and smaller percentage of voters as time goes on.

Whites also—unlike many other ethnic groups—do not vote as a solid bloc. There are many liberal whites males, for example, who support the anti-white anti-male stance of the current Democratic Party. What’s more, young people have in recent decades been steeped in anti-white anti-male rhetoric through a host of influences, starting with education and continuing in popular culture and the press. An enormous number of young white people are on board with this. So far I haven’t been able to find a breakdown of youth voting patterns by race, so I don’t know how white voters under 30 have been voting, but the preference for Democrats among voters under 30 is so huge and pronounced that I’d be surprised if white males under 30 weren’t part of it (and note, if you read that link, that voters under 30 accounted in large part for the Democratic victory in the House in 2018).

Democrats long ago decided to case their lot with identity politics. That certainly paid off during the Obama years in terms of political power in the federal government. I’m not sure that the Republican victory in 2016 on the national level (presidency and legislature) represents a long-lasting reversal for the Democrats, as the 2018 midterms showed. If Republicans hold their own in 2020 I think the argument that Democrats have hurt themselves will be stronger, however.

I do think that on the more local (state) level, there definitely has been a general trend toward the right. Whether that has anything to do with a reaction to the anti-male anti-white stance of the Democratic Party I don’t know, but it’s certainly possible.

I’m also not sure the Democrats have a coherent message except for racial and gender identity politics: we are the nice people, the ones who care, and the GOP are the bigots. There don’t seem to be any winning alternatives, so they may as well stick with it.

Drudge

The New Neo Posted on by

I find Drudge very depressing today. It’s probably due to the prominent place given to the Democrats being sworn into power in the House, and the sense of deja vu combined with a sinking feeling that I’ve often had in the last decade or two, of things slipping away and time running out.

But I happened to notice something on the page I’d never seen before. I’m not a daily Drudge devotee, but I go there now and then just to see what people are talking about. Today I noticed a little line in the lower right of the page that says this:

VISITS TO DRUDGE 1/3/2019

029,718,569 PAST 24 HOURS

I knew Drudge was influential and had enormous traffic, but 30 million a day?

Anyone able to tell me why? There are plenty of other news aggregates, but what’s his secret?

I know the page started as a gossip column (back in 1995) and in some ways retains aspects of that. I recall that Andrew Breitbart was part of its early growth. I know that Drudge was instrumental in breaking the Lewinsky story.

But why is it still so popular? It’s got an archaic design—hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Is it mostly habit that accounts for the huge amount of traffic, or is there something else I’m missing?

That Drudge Wiki entry describes the site as conservative. I think that used to be more true than it is now. It also says the site has 3 million visitors a day, which seems more in line with reality; probably the disparity in figures represents the difference between visits and visitors. Perhaps a lot of people check the site over and over and over, compulsively, during a single day.

Oh, and about that foreign-influences-on-the-elections thing

The New Neo Posted on by

We have ballot harvesting by DREAMERS in California:

Voting up until now has been a practice reserved for citizens. Today, non-citizens vote – by getting hold of indifferent Americans and in a perfectly legal setup in California, filling in the ballots by proxy, with no fingerprints visible. Who knows what kind of coercion may be employed by some of them?

And even more disturbingly, if DREAMers can do that to promote their own political agenda, what’s to stop other foreigners, with far more malign agendas, from doing it?