He's good. And I like the comments there too.

Scalzi is good at making points.

I pointed out to someone of the right political persuasion that "going Galt" has no point unless the individual taking low employment or retiring is of magnificent intelligence and crucially necessary to the continuation of a business or industry. For anyone else it's a hilariously overinflated gesture.

Fine for a point in fiction, laughable in the real world.

"Long narratives" is quite the euphemism from one point of view. But I must admit it held my attention all the way through on the one reading I have given it. Even the famous Speech, although I spent most of the time sharpening my blade for hypothetical riposts.

(I wonder whether Heinlein was influenced any by Rand's characters' speechifying? He has a similar penchant for long didactic dialogues and monologues. Although his are far more entertaining than hers.)

I saw Shrugged as the biggest strawman of all time. It's not that I disagree with her main points, it's that she casts all holders of opposing viewpoints as evil or ignorant and never allows them to make any of the decent counterarguments, thereby implying that there aren't any. When they get some air time, I am drawn to more moderate conclusions.

But without Shrugged, what would college students have to talk about? It is practically a rite of passage.

This always made me chuckle whenever Atlas Shrugged is mentioned.




Rob

I have seen it said that taxes are the price the wealthy pay for the proletariat not revolting. There's a lot to be said for that.

Well Jim, it is because we are coming to the end of a generation of percentage raises. When everyone gets 10%, the guy making 80,000 gets a whole lot more raise than the guy making 10,000.

But programming percentages is so much easier than dealing with pay tables that the lazy way has been in effect a long time -- and it shows. And at the end of 10 years of this the 10,000 guy is making 26,918, and all thanks to the fact that the base shifts every year.

I told someone in City personnel years ago that the system was going to fail one day. Good old Heinlein and the Newdollar.

We are headed there.

Someone making $80k probably does not have a lot of investment income taxed at the capital gains rate, so the percentage disparity you see with the very wealthy would not come into play. It makes a great deal more sense to look at quantities, not percentages.

Even with such percentage disparity, the vast bulk of taxes are paid by the top few percenters.

The system is clumsy and uneven and often unfair, but the ever-decreasing level of accountability is more serious than most imbalances in the taxation levels.

And don't forget that federal income taxes are only a minor to nonexistent component of the tax burden of the poorest among us. Just because they pay no federal income taxes doesn't mean they pay no taxes.

Yes, sales tax in particular is regressive, as are things like the property tax component of vehicle registrations. Both are pitilessly without exception as well.

I'll confess that the specifics of regressive tax badness elude me; it seems that if you live on 10k a year and spend, say, 5k of that on taxable goods, you pay a rate proportional to what someone making and spending ten times as much does - it becomes some larger percentage of your income, but entirely proportional. The arguments painting such a tax unfair seem to boil down to it being unfair that those who make more money can more easily afford it - which in turn seems to be a rather namby-pamby socialist viewpoint taken by those who think it's unfair that anyone, anywhere has more than some arbitrarily defined level. (Usually that of the speaker, oddly enough.)

I have lived at a number of economic levels in my life, including more than one stop at the uninsured, fearing the knock at the door, how the hell am I going to feed my family this week station. At no point did I ever acquire a sense of resentment that there were those who were better off than me. (Nor any sense that being broke was a moral failing.) I don't have much sympathy for arguments that pivot on either sentiment.

It doesn't take resentment to note that the disparity between the rich and the poor is at record levels, and to realize that at some point that pendulum is going to swing back the other way. Whatever people want to call that process, it's just reversion to the mean in action.

A of Scalzi's Criticism of Rand.

Hmm, to critique the criticism, "End the culture war by restoring classical values" sounds a lot like "End the war in <region of the world> by wiping out all the inhabitants of <country>." Wars usually end with some sort of diplomacy.

Well, Jim, I work for Da Man. While taxes are not identical across the board, by bracket the worst is about 35% or so. I don't work high-dollar accounts so I can't be exact.

But just as the very poor get their goodies back as Earned Income Credits, the wealthy get theirs back as Net Operating Losses -- and NOLs bracket more years, and take effect in greater spans, so the goodies come back in a loss year via taxes paid in a fatter time.

Never mind. The intricacies of taxation are not of interest to those in the middle.

One of these days I would *love* to see someone knowledgeable go through the entire US Federal Income Tax Code and pick out the provisions that are so arcane and convoluted, they were obviously put there to benefit one single very influential taxpayer. I understand there are many of them. Then the fun game will be to identify the taxpayer.

Here's one:

State budget deal includes tax break for family firm
The roughly $30-million provision will let the Humboldt Redwood Co., owned by the influential Fisher family, deduct old losses and will cover penalties and interest.
October 06, 2010|By Jack Dolan, Los Angeles Times

Buried in the details of the deal to close California's $19-billion budget deficit is a roughly $30-million tax break crafted to benefit a company owned by members of one of the state's richest and most politically influential families, according to a legislative analysis obtained by The Times.

The provision, which will allow the Humboldt Redwood Co. to deduct $20 million in old losses from future taxes, is also expected to cover penalties and interest for the firm co-owned by three sons of Donald G. Fisher, founder of the Gap and Banana Republic, said company Chairman Sandy Dean.

Well, TINA, I haven't and wouldn't argue that the US income tax structure is fair and balanced.

One of the biggest problems is that the structure has not been allowed to increase any bracket's taxes without massive political repercussions, otherwise it would be relatively simple to reduce here and increase there to try to work towards fairness and parity. (I am making the base assumption that the system needs to generate X amount of revenue, so cutting across the board, as reform pols often propose, is not a workable solution. Take the "choke government funding" argument to another thread, after reading the history of Prop 13...)

So the only increases, overt and through sleight of hand with deductions, allowances etc. have been targeted against those with the most money and least political power, that is, the middle to upper bracket working class. No point in going against those lower; blood, stone, etc. Going after the wealthier is politically difficult at best and suicide in most cases - especially for pols who depend on a small number of major donors rather than those who draw from a broader populace.

So you end up with a system that is fair across the board in big strokes, but as you reduce the granularity of the scale you find many peaks and valleys where taxpayers fall into deep bracket crevasses (while their neighbor gets every break).

I'm all for taxation reform but I have yet to hear a workable plan (starting with the idiocy of flat-tax, which comes up about every four years). The problem here is that NO workable plan is going to be simple, and NO effective plan is going to be politically neutral.

"fuckuva" adj. indicating something immense, overwhelming, unjust, mean, or just plain horseshit- literal translation "F-ed!"

"is that lady with the rolling pin in her bony mitt Mrs. Grundy ? fuckuva way to be greeted !"



Nick

I think, Jim, that your rant exposes the truth behind a proposition of mine, that a country's people get not the government they want, nor the government they need, but the government they deserve. Any argument that the problem is due either to the f****wits in Washington or the f****wits in the populace is misattributing at least 50% of the blame.

Four posts thataway ^