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Convenient legal fictions?

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Or drop them off a 1749 foot tall tower? :)

It should have happened to whoever imprgenated his mother.

Curiously, the 1.47km, or about 5usec at the speed of light, has nothing to do with the extent to which the Sun delays light in its immediate vicinity, which is about 100usec (as was measured back in the 1970s by bouncing radar pulses off Mars when the planet was on the opposite side of the sun to us).

The link is to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Kyoto University and seems to be more of a sterile exercise in dimensional analysis than the sort of stuff that might be taught in General Relativity 101.

Note that even a Japanese History and Philosophy of Science department knows the right abbreviation for the kilometre - km - while Ken Stupid Tucker persists with Km.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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No, I'm unconcerned by irrelevant detail.

Charging a lower rate of income tax on income from investments is one way of getting more investment, but no other country seems to do it. Australia has a comparable system, in which dividends on which corporate tax has already been paid carry an additional tax credit, which individual taxpayers can set off against their income tax, which does avoid the "double taxation" problem, and doesn't seem to be as susceptible to tax avoidance games as your system.

However worthy the original idea might have been, the practical result is that the US is failing to collect a lot of income tax from people with a lot of income, and the Occupy movement is doing well out of publicising the fact.

So what?

And would be paying roughly twice that under a more rational system.

It's not everybody else, just a spectacularly well-off minority who have the political clout to get these kinds of sweet-heart deals written into legislation in the first place.

In earlier threads you have told me that raising income tax across the board hasn't got a hope of balancing the budget. You obviously hadn't thought about blocking the obvious loopholes that reduce the effective tax rate for people with very high incomes.

Incomes over a $1M represent 10% of the total income taxed - collecting more tax on that proportion of the national income is going to make an appreciable difference.

Barack's spending is Keynesian pump-priming - not very efficient pump- priming because the influence of far-right-thinking politicians, but a lot more effective than no pump-priming. You've got ideological reservations about the whole approach, and would much prefer to see you economy in the disfunctional condition that it achieved in 1933, with 25% of the population out of work and the GDP down to 75% of what it had been in 1929, but while this might be morally preferable to the more prosperous condition you've got by deficit spending, few people share your bizarre values.

M is about 29%(*),

which presumably includes people who can't structure their income as flexibly as Warren Buffett and Milt Romney.

Curiously, the effective rate declines to 26.3% for people paying more than $10M, who presumably can structure their incomes even more flexibly. The tax table you quote shows the effective tax rate rising progressively less rapidly as your income rises, peaking at 29.7% at incomes in the range $2M to $5M, then declining again - to 29.1% - for incomes between $5M and $10M before dropping dramatically for incomes over $10M.

billionaires is hollow, a fairy tale, and

He's not talking about tax-cheating, but tax avoiding, and 12% is the extreme case. There's certainly a lot of tax out there that could be collected if some of the loop-holes were closed, and the pattern of tax collection against income does support the hypothesis that very high income individuals get to write their own tax-loopholes into irrelevant legislation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not nuclear reactors, and not their containment vessels either, idiot.

The alarmists argue that warming causes CO2 *and* that CO2 causes warming. That positive feedback gain is necessary to justify taking over the world's economy.

John

A corporation is a group of people, just like a church, a union, a golf club, a university, La Raza or the NRA or the NAACP. If people have free speech rights, and we have the right to assemble, it seems reasonable to me that groups of people have 1st Amendment rights.

Some people have principles, and some people just want to win.

John

Don't be stupid. The CO2 fluctuations before the industrial revolution were driven by the Milankovitch cycles

and the rise in CO2 level in the atmosphere was an effect rather than a cause, and followed the warming. We've told you this often enough.

Our current situation is that we are digging up fossil carbon and burning it as fuel - which only started happening a few hundred years ago.

The scientific consensus is that warming does release some CO2 from the oceans - with a lag of about 800 years. At the moment about half of the CO2 we inject into the atmosphere seems to be ending up in the oceans, and we'll have to warm the oceans quite a bit before that stops happening.

This isn't one of the positive feedbacks that is worrying at present. The main one is that a warmer world has warmer oceans, so the partial pressure of water vapour - another green-house gas - in the atmosphere is higher. It's a more potent green-house gas than CO2 so this is significant.

And nobody wants to "take over the world economy". What's required is the imposition of a tax on burning fossil carbon that more than covers the damage now being caused by anthropogenic global warming, bearing mind the future damage that it seems likely to cause.

This will almost certainly make non-damaging sustainable energy sources economically competitive and roughly double the price of energy in the short term, but it's cheaper than finding a new planet.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since you're arguing overall rates and their effect, and dismiss the actual rates and their effect as irrelevant, there's really nothing more to say.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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Seems reasonable to me too--just because people form a group to cooperate, provide jobs, and provide a service or product doesn't mean they aren't people.

Right. The same people who object to "corporate personhood" have no problem with mandatory union membership, where the union's dues are used against their (unwilling) members' wishes and beliefs.

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Or with citizenship, where tax collected is used against some of the citizens wishes and beliefs - the US governments deficit-financed spending to keep the economy from going into dramatic recession certainly doesn't meet with your approval.

This is a persistent problem with any human organisation - you can't keep everybody happy, so the organisation has to settle for going along with the wishes of the majority. It's called democracy - try reading about it sometime, you might find the ideas interesting, if unfamiliar.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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You - on the other hand - seem to think that listing the actual rates and ignoring their effects is presenting some kind of counter- argument. It's more in the nature of setting up a smoke-screen of detail that glosses over the embarrassing realities.

It's perfectly typical that you posted a link to a detailed breakdown of US income tax collection and cited one - slightly misleading - figure from it.

When I fill out the story with the data that you carefully ignored, you fail to respond, and don't mark the snip in your response.

">>> In fact, the aggregate, average, effective rate paid by people earning>$1M is about 29%(*),

I've never been entirely sure whether your peculiar blindness to facts that don't suit your argument was due to a kind of unconscious tunnel- vision, or simple mendacity.

I'm beginning to favour mendacity.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Aside from being a convenient legal fiction, a corporation has the potential to live on past the lives of its creators, possibly indefinitely, quite unlike a natural person. If a corporation wants the rest of the rights of a natural person it must also take on the rest of the liabilities; otherwise there is no equity and natural persons become second class citizens.

?-)

In GR 101, that kind of formulation would be directed at getting an answer that would match an experimentally measured effect. It follows that that example would never hve showed up in a GR 101 class, and equally - since you didn't have that kind of example to hand - that you never sat through a GR 101 class, which makes you a fraud.

And not one that would be presented to people who were being trained to be actual scientists. The fact that you can't come up with a useful version of the same idea is evidence of the shallowness of your purported knowledge.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I can understand why you might have high hopes of such program, even though it doesn't seem to have done much for you. You are - of course

- free to recommend it to others, though your failures in comprehension do seem to mean that you don't choose your recommendees all that intelligently.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I gave you the entire table, which dismantles your premise in detail, and that somehow's a lie? That's not a serious argument. Now, you want to insist on some irrelevant triviality (26% vs: 29%, for a very small group), to change the argument ex post facto?

And this somehow proves your tinfoil hat's worst fear, that rich people are paying lower rates? That somewhere there's a sheckel, yen, or dinar you aren't getting your fair share of? Idiotic.

You shouldn't make qualitative statements about things you don't understand where there are quantitative facts to contradict you. Stick to weather.

To whatever sentient being might read this, effective rates fall for incomes over $10M because it's pretty hard to make that much in wages-- part of it is almost certainly capital gains, taxed at a lower rate. Even so, these people's effective average rate is 26%--a great deal higher than lesser brackets, not lower. Again, Bill's wrong.

This whole unseemly envy thing is for parasites and illiterates. Robbing the rich does not make the country wealthier, does not create more to spread, does not raise up the poor, nor teach the poor to raise themselves. And it's unsustainable--wiping out the rich and eating their bodies wouldn't cover a single Obama stimulus. It's not a cure for anything.

The portion to be gotten from higher taxes on the "rich" is almost trivial--especially when 2nd order effects are considered (with 2nd order effects, revenue goes down). The idea that if we shear sheep closer they'll make more wool is for fools.

Per Sen. Kyl, the "Bush tax cuts" progressives have spent a decade hating resulted in a *more* progressive taxation, not less.

What small-minded, mean-spirited petty nonsense. It all pales before Barack's spending, and that's not even counting Obamacare, the biggest entitlement, literally, in world history, heaped on a country already struggling with promises it can never keep. That's the real problem, and that's what's put America on the brink.

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The table doesn't dismantle my premise - so that's a lie - since nothing in it is going to undo the fact that Warren Buffett and Milt Romney pay 17% tax on their total income, while the people who work for them are paying over 30%.

Citing a mass of minimally relevant detail doesn't dismantle anything.

It's not a triviality. You tax system is nominally progressive, but the progression stops at incomes between $2N and $5M per year, and reverses for the highest category.

It's you who aren't getting your fair share of their dollars, not me, and somebody has sold you a bill of goods that persuades you (incorrectly) that this situation is the best of all possible worlds.

Funny that you should mention that. You don't - at some level - recognise that Warren Buffet and Milt Romney are paying a lower rate of income tax than you are, which is a quantitative fact that contradicts your point of view, and your counter-argument is to cite loads of irrelevant detail which can only serve to confuse the issue.

Which you don't understand either, and are consequently happy to accept the deceitful propaganda that is bought and paid for by Exxon- Mobil amongst others all of whom have a financial interest in keeping the public deceived for as long as possible.

"Almost certainly"? Capital gain isn't income and would not be reported as such any place where I've lived.

Scarcely. Warren Buffett and Milt Romney have a lot of money and have had a long time organise their affairs to minimise the the tax they pay on their incomes, and they get it down to 17%. People who suddenly start earning a lot of money - windfall profits - will be paying a lot more income tax. Many of the people who earn more than $1M in any single year didn't expect to do that and won't ever do it again, and couldn't take advantage of all the loopholes in the way that the seriously rich can.

It's not envy, just an appreciation of how tax systems work. The more income you've got, the more it makes sense to spend some of it on setting up tax avoidance schemes. The very rich have got a lot of money, which means that they can spend a lot of money on legal delaying tactics, and there aren't all that many of them, so the income tax collectors concentrate on softer targets.

Except that it's not robbing the rich to expect them to pay out the same or a somwhat higher proportion of their income as income tax that do people who are less well off - that is an equitable distribution of the costs of living in an organised society with effective collective services (without which the the rich wouldn't be anything like as rich as they are).

That certainly wouldn't be sustainable. The kind of tax structure that exists in Germany is obviously sustainable - more sustainable than yours - and supports a better system of collective services, which mean that their rich are getting richer than your rich.

You are setting up your usual straw man, confusing modern socialism with communism - when communism was in practice rule by rapacious oligarchs, not all that different in practice from the US system, where political power is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, who use it to make sure that most of the benefits of economic growth end up in their own pockets - and with kind of old-fashioned strip-the- rich socialism that was briefly popular immediately after WW2, where the motivation for ripping off the rich wasn't so much rapacity as fear, because the politicians involved were - not unreasonably - anxious about the political influence that loads of money can buy (and is buying in the US at the moment).

"Wiping out the rich and eating their bodies" wouldn't cure anything, but since nobody is proposing anything of the sort, this just one more of your dishonest rhetorical irrelevances.

About 10% of US income is collected by people getting more than $1M per year. Quite a few of them pay more or less fair levels of income tax, and quite a few more don't. The money involved isn't trivial

Really? More "progressive" than what?

It's certainly not petty, and there's nothing mean-spirited about insisting that everybody pays their fair share of the costs of running the community of which they form a part. Humans have evolved exquisitely sensitive mechanisms for detecting who isn't pulling their weight in society - your rich tax-avoiders fall squarely into that category.

Since the real problem is the aftermath of the bank generated house- price bubble - blown up to maximise their profits, which you've never clawed back - and Barack's spending is merely the rational response to this disaster, you couldn't be more wrong, but your ideological blinkers blind you to this.

Obama's health care bill does give the health insurance industry a lot more than they deserve, but it's a useful step on the road to universal health care. What the health insurance companies don't seem to have noticed is that it makes them something very close to a public service organisation, necessarily subject to government regulation. The health insurance companies in France, Germany and the Netherlands are privately owned companies, with shares quoted on the stock exchange, but they are closely regulated and have to meet much more stringent price-performance criteria than the extravagant US health insurance business could hope to achieve.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen