Hmmmm?

That has led to the situation of more and more complex financial "products" being developed, to the point where even the self-proclaimed "experts" don't fully understand them, and we have situations such as the sub-prime crisis, which could have been predicted by anyone with basic high-school arithmetic.

--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence 
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
                                       (Richard Feynman)

Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" ISBN 978-0-141-04353-1 consists of a series of reports about a few people who did predict it and made quite a bit of money by betting that it was going to happen. That took rather more than high school arithmetic.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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uring? My statement was largely directed to DoD related R&D (so-called), 99= % of which is job preservation oriented and of little to no value. Compare = Israel's Iron Dome to anything this joke country has done recently- not in = a million years could that performance be duplicated.

r,

For a bunch of reasons, most obviously that roof-bounce is strongly attenuated compared to the direct sunlight.

Also, o (John) the tubular topology makes poor use of the expensive photovoltaic surface area o the glass tubes are delicate, and hard to manufacture o "roof bounce" heats the roof, raising the operating temperatures, reducing efficiency.

There are probably a lot of other reasons.

Why not just catch the light directly, with a simple flat panel? That makes way more efficient use of the insolation, with a form factor that's waayyy easier and cheaper to make and install.

st, so anything that eliminates that burden is fanastic. It's not like anyt= hing had to be guessed at here, it is almost trivial to compute and verify = the energy harvest from those things. Something shady going on that a compa= ny with $1.2B in orders goes under.

For wind resistance, mount it low and firm. Tracking usually doesn't add much, so most people don't.

A 3-D surface may have more even output over various incoming angles, but at the expense of not using the full surface area simultaneously (imagine the morning sun lighting the wall of one prong of a "U"). 2- D is so much cheaper you just add a little area.

Anyway, the empirical data is in: 2-D kicked their butt.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

.01% paying 4% would mean they're paying at 400x their proportion of the population.

That sounds like a lot to me!

-- Cheers, James Arthur

As a practical matter, it doesn't. They already pay a lot. Too high and you just chase the people away.

The tax rates are still progressive and still available to everyone, it's just that people in this category earn their money in different categories--it's the rare individual who gets that kind of money in wages.

E.g. progressive John Edwards, whose ambulance-chasing proceeds went into some vehicle (partnership?) giving him capital gains, so that he wouldn't have to pay ordinary income tax on the booty, IIRC.

$153 billion tax on $204 billion in income? That's a 75% tax rate. Ouch.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The US population is about 300M, so .01% would be 30K paying 43 billion, or 1.4 million each. That doesn't seem too much since the upper .01% are probably making 5 or 10 times that.

-Bill

Sure, but you can't do joined-up logic.That 0.01% are those earning more than $10M per year, which means that they've found a very remunerative way of collaborating with the rest of us. If the rest of us weren't there, they wouldn't be making a dime.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

..

The category is defined as those earning more than $10M per year. On average they now pay out 26.3% of their income as income tax which would imply at least $2.63M each.

In reality, the category is split between people who have been very rich for a very long time, like Mitt Romney and Warren Buffett, who pay about 17%, and people who've been unexpectedly lucky, and haven't had the chance to organise their income in a way that minimises their tax liability. It's going to be a bimodal distribution.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

True. Nobody is going to bother trying for more than 60% which would be $122 billion on $204 billion, so $70 billion extra would have been more realistic, but in reality, any such program would also extract more money from the larger category with incomes over $1M per year, who are good for another $400-odd billion in income, so the ostensibly more precise number isn't actually constructing a more realistic impression in the reader's mind.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

teabagger

due

Making my case for me, thank you.

?-)

..

That calculation has a lot of babies paying $1.4 million each--let's hope they're raking it in!

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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And you claim to be numerate ...

The 0.01% was defined as those reporting earnings over $10M per year. Few babies earn that much, and even fewer report such earnings.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Well, I'm not sure what the .01% relates to, but if you want to use it as a percentage of people who actually filed tax returns, it may be only 150 million from what I can find. That would put the tax liability of the upper .01% at maybe 2X what I figured, or 2.8 million on incomes around 10 million. That's still reasonable at 28%. The highest marginal tax bracket is 35%, so we know that guys like Bill Clinton, making 80M, pay less than 28 million tax. I would be happy with that.

-Bill

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Bill's calculation, clearly stated above, was 0.01% of the US population. Are you saying there aren't any babies in the US?

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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But, of those returns, only about half paid any net tax. So, double it again.

If you do that you get pretty close to what those people actually paid.

From this link direct from the IRS...

(index page here:

8123,00.html)

...we see that the average person in this category paid $6.6 million in tax at an overall effective rate of 26.3%, which is pretty close to your 28% "reasonable" figure.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

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The more than $10M per year income group paid out - on average - 26.3% of their income in income tax. Less than the the roughly 30% paid out by the $1M to $10M per year group, and less than the 28.8% paid out by the $0.5M to $1M per year group.

Two prominent members of the $10M plus group - Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney - are known to pay out only some 17% of income and the presumption is that if you've been getting that kind of income on a regular basis, you can engineer it to get the tax you pay down to the kind of level. People who unexpectedly make more than $10M in a single year won't have this opportunity,

Why? People on much lower incomes end up paying out the same proportion of their income in tax. Why should the income tax system stop being progressive for incomes over $1M per year?

The practical answer is that if you've got enough money you can always find somebody to "influence". In Greece they bribed the tax inspectors. In the US you pay lobbyists to write tax-loop-holes into irrelevant legislation. Bribery is a crime. Lobbying is - so far - still legal, but obviously it's scandalous abuse of the legislative process.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Wrong. The original "0.01%" was the 8,180 who earned more than $10M per year out of some 81,000,000 who put in a return.

98123,00.html)

Which picks a table labelled "Table 1.1 Selected Income and Tax Items, by Size and Accumulated Size of Adjusted Gross Income, Tax Year 2009"

which now lists some 140,494,127 people as having filed returns in

2009, of whom 8,274 now earned more than $10M in 2009.

Except that this isn't a homogeneous population. People who have been earning lots of money for a long time - like Warren Buffett and Mitt Romney - pay out about 17% of their income in taxes, presumably because they've had time to engineer their income to minimise the tax take.

People who happen to earn more than $10M in an unexpectedly good year don't have this option, and presumably pay quite a lot more. If sustained and unexpected high incomes are distributed in the same way, you could figure that some 80% of the >$10M incomes were unexpected one-offs paying out about 30% in tax, while the remaining 20% paid out about 17%, but that's a dubious assumption.

One of the comments about Warren Buffett's income was that it was remarkably low for somebody of his capital worth.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Bill Bowden hadn't been paying close attention. The 0.01% of the taxpaying population involved - some 8,180 people, with incomes over $10M per year - are identified on a US tax office web-page in

"Table 1.1 Selected Income and Tax Items, by Size and Accumulated Size of Adjusted Gross Income, Tax Year 2009"

which I copied onto my hard disk a few months ago. Apparently another

60 million-odd people submit tax returns but don't pay any tax.

That group might include some babies.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Actually, I think the progression ends at 350K or so which represents probably the highest salaries. Income above 350K is likely all capital gains subject to considerable risk, so the rates are lower to encourage investment. And don't forget Warren Buffet lost 10 billion of personal wealth in the market decline of 08 and still ended up owing taxes on his 100K salary.

-Bill