Obsidian Wings

Bracketology

by Eric Martin

Annie Lowery, arguing for additional tax brackets at the top, is making sense:

For the past 20 years, the top income tax bracket has started around $370,000, and top marginal tax rate has stayed between 35 and 39.6 percent. But since the mid-1990s, the richest have gotten richer, earning a higher and higher share of all income while paying the same income tax rate as more moderate-income workers.

Kevin Drum's numbers are a decent jump point to start the conversation:

Indeed they have...How about if we reduce the top rate on the well-off (say, those making between $200,000 and $370,000), raise it on the rich (between $370,000 and $1 million), and raise it a bunch on the super rich (over $1 million). If you really want to get ambitious, you could even add yet another bracket that kicks in around, say, $5 million.

Why not? As Annie points out, we used to have more brackets. There's no law that says everyone over $370,000 should pay the exact same rate, and the supply-side theory that the super rich will lose all their ambition if their tax rates go up is based on essentially no evidence at all. What's more, the rich and the super rich (not the merely well off) are the ones who have really done well over the past couple of decades, so higher brackets for them make sense.

This would not only be politically popular, but would help to shore up the tax revenue shortfall while preserving the basic, progressive structure that everyone from Adam Smith to Teddy Roosevelt endorsed.

The Cracks Between The Paving Stones

by guest blogger Gary Farber.

Can you be a good leader and a bad person?  How much or little of the outer politician needs to reflect the inner person?

François de La Rochefoucauld famously said: "Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu" -- "Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue." 

Americans have always debated how much they should vote for the person or the policies, and voting for a personality seems to win more than not. 

John H. Richardson's fresh profile of Newt Gingrich is apt to raise such issues again.  Marianne Gingrich, the second former Mrs. Gingrich:

[...] She stops, ashes her cigarette, exhales, searching for the right way to express what she's about to say.

"He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected," she says. "If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president."

Sitting on a bench, she squints against the light. "He always told me that he's always going to pull the rabbit out of the hat," she says.

Waste Not, Want Not

by guest poster Gary Farber.

How much is $50 billion? 

That's how much the president proposes we spend:

[...] It calls for a quick infusion of $50 billion in government spending that White House officials said could spur job growth as early as next year — if Congress approves. [...]  Central to the plan is the president’s call for an “infrastructure bank,” which would be run by the government but would pool tax dollars with private investment, the White House says. [...] Specifically, the president wants to rebuild 150,000 miles of road, lay and maintain 4,000 miles of rail track, restore 150 miles of runways and advance a next-generation air-traffic control system.

[...]

The White House did not offer a price tag for the full measure or say how many jobs it would create. If Congress simply reauthorized the expired transportation bill and accounted for inflation, the new measure would cost about $350 billion over the next six years. But Mr. Obama wants to “frontload” the new bill with an additional $50 billion in initial investment to generate jobs, and vowed it would be “fully paid for.” The White House is proposing to offset the $50 billion by eliminating tax breaks and subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

After months of campaigning on the theme that the president’s $787 billion stimulus package was wasteful, Republicans sought Monday to tag the new plan with the stimulus label. The Republican National Committee called it “stimulus déjà vu,” and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican whip, characterized it as “yet another government stimulus effort.”

Which sounds good to me, if not to you, but we can all agree that we don't want to "waste" money.

Even before the announcement Monday, Republicans were expressing caution.

“It’s important to keep in mind that increased spending — no matter the method of delivery — is not free,” said Representative Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican who is on a Ways and Means subcommittee that held hearings on the bank this year. He warned that “federally guaranteed borrowing and lending could place taxpayers on the hook should the proposed bank fail.”

Such concern might have come earlier: 

• The Department of Defense is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion it spent on reconstruction in Iraq.
• Source: Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (PDF).

Polite Conversation

by Eric Martin

This is an utterly shocking display of anti-Semitism, especially coming from a major media figure:

But, frankly, Jewish life is cheap, most notably to Jews. And among those Jews, there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Actually, that's not exactly how the above quote reads.  It's from The New Republic's Marty Peretz, and it actually goes like this:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

Can you imagine the uproar that would occur if a major media outlet had published the first example?  Yet there is relative silence because instead of directing rank bigotry at Jews, Catholics or some other religious group, the hate is directed at Muslims.  Which serves to put a respectable veneer on something that is truly vile.

A Periodic Table of Blog Commenters

By guest poster Gary Farber.

I don't have one of those.  Sorry. 

But, hey, it's Labor Day weekend, and so a post of silly or unusual links, and open-threadedness for all!

This first one you just have to trust me on: A Periodic Table Of Visualization Methods.  This sounds incredibly dull, but is immensely cool.  Check out the interactivity that a screen shot could barely hint at.

Don't like that one?  Use The Periodic Table Of Swearing.  (Should not be viewed by anyone offended by naughty words.  Really.)

(UPDATE: link fixed. Originally from Modern Toss.)

How about an actually useful Table Of Condiments and their spoilage?

The Periodic Table Of Candy.  The Periodic Table Of Awesoments.  (Hey, it's not my title.)  The Periodic Table Of Rejected Elements.  And finally, The Wooden Periodic Table Table. 

But we need more visualizations! A metrocontextual science map (original here), which is to say, in the form of a London Underground map.

Why Argue On Blogs? The Dunning-Kruger Effect

by guest poster Gary Farber.

You're biased!

Of course you are.  We all are.  We can't think without basing our thinking on our past experiences and conclusions, and so we are led into all sorts of cognitive bias. 

Errol Morris had a brilliant series  in June on The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is.

You should read Part 1, which includes the tale of the bank robber astonished to find that putting lemon juice on his face didn't make him invisible to cameras.

No Escape

By guest poster Gary Farber.

Prison rape jokes abound every time a heinous trial or crime is in the news. 

I don't need to repeat any: you've heard them.  Heh, heh, I'm not going to feel sorry for that mass murderer/rapist/con artist/thief, and what's coming to him.

Of course, few of us think we'll ever wind up in jail, let alone prison, and most of us won't. 

Prison rape is what happens to The Other. 

Which is where the laughing and the righteous vengeance arise: it's not so funny if you imagine yourself, or one of your loved ones, trapped in an injustice system, unjustly thrust into captivity, and subject to brutal sexual and violent abuse.

Last week, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report: Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09.

As you imagine, it's not enjoyable reading. 

Mothers of the Disappeared

by Eric Martin

A reminder to those that advocate for war with Iran of what war entails:

In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers.

In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word “majhoul,” or unknown:

No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, “Mother, where is happiness?” The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him.

“Go back,” Hamid asked the projectionist. No. 5061 returned to the screen. “That’s him,” he said, nodding grimly.

His mother followed him into the room, her weathered face framed in a black veil. “Show me my son!” she cried.

Behind her, Hamid pleaded silently. He waved his hands at the projectionist, begging him to spare her. In vain, he shook his head and mouthed the word “no.”

“Don’t tell me he’s dead,” she shouted at the room. “It’s not him! It’s not him!”

No. 5061 returned to the screen.

She lurched forward, shaking her head in denial. Her eyes stared hard. And in seconds, her son’s 33 years of life seemed to pass before her eyes.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she finally sobbed, falling back in her chair.

Reflexively, her hands slapped her face. They clawed, until her nails drew blood. “If I had only known from the first day!” she cried.

The horror of this war is its numbers, frozen in the portraits at the morgue: an infant’s eyes sealed shut and a woman’s hair combed in blood and ash. “Files tossed on the shelves,” a policeman called the dead, and that very anonymity lends itself to the war’s name here — al-ahdath, or the events.

On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war — 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

This number had a name, though.

No. 5061 was Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, father, son and brother. At 9 a.m., on that Sunday, Aug. 15, his family left the morgue in a white Nissan and set out to find his body in a city torn between remembering and forgetting, where death haunts a country neither at war nor peace.

Read the rest.  It is Shadid at his poignant best.

The stories recounted in that article should also give pause to those rushing to declare the Iraq war a victory, and to give Bush the credit for it.  Generally speaking wars have few winners.  This one in particular.

News & Notes

by Eric Martin

1.  I have, at last, succumbed to the world of Twitter - because, yeah, blog posts are too long and detailed for the modern man.  That, and apparently, I don't waste enough time with Facebook, email and a gazillion blogs.  You can find me here.  If you, too, Tweet, feel free to reach out and connect.

2.  I have recently joined the Democracy Arsenal crew, and will be blogging over there on occasion as well.  Not that I'm abandoning Obsidian Wings.  My first post is here.

3.  As some of you no doubt have noticed, Balloon Juice has added an excellent right-of-center voice in E.D. Kain.  This is something that I believe would benefit Obsidian Wings - especially now that Von's semi-retirement is taking on a more permanent character.  So if you have any right-of-center blogger recommendations that you would like to see join up here, and that you think would be realistic in terms of the particular blogger's willingness/interest, please leave a comment (keep in mind that one of my favorites, Greg Djerejian, has yet to accept my invitation, though he is always gracious when he declines). 

4. I'll be on vacation this weekend (from Friday to Monday), but you will have a guest poster here to keep you all company.  He's a familiar face to almost all of you.

Prospect Harbor

by von

 

I'm retiring.  I may still comment, here, or at Mr. Coates' or Ms. McArdle's or someone else's place.*  I still harbor a faint hope that I might return to our own front page permanently. 

I fear, though, that I would have to blog under under my real name .... which would kill some of the fun.**

In any event, the picture above is of my youngest, in Maine, with her cousin(s) (reflected).  Cute, huh?  Just keep in mind that she has been trained in Southern Crane Shao-lin style to, like, totally kick your ass.  And she definitely won't fight fair.

*As long-time readers will know, I'm the classic-liberal leaning one on this blog, so I guess it figures that I like Jane Galt. 

**I do reserve the right to come back, erratically, and post -- at least, until they change the passwords.