thanks for reading.

When i was setting up a business, i went through federal, state, and local tax laws to figure out what i needed to do. I was kind of annoyed with the fact that *everyone* wanted a piece of the money. And my annoyance with this state of affairs caused me to go back to the theory for the basis of taxation for some resolution.

My current understanding of progressive taxation is that it is an attempt to share the burden (impact) equally along with an understanding of the concept of the marginal value of money.

That is to say that how much money you have influences how much a given percentage of increase or decrease impacts you.

For (an extreme and unrealistic) example, at the poverty line, 1% increase or decrease could mean making your rent and eating, or being homeless. Basic living expenses aren't a percentage of income, they are fixed. For someone like me, 1% has nowhere near the impact. I barely have to pay attention to a budget because there is a great deal of slack in it (and i normally tend to be rather frugal because of my parents).

So for example we could say, the tax rate should have an impact across the board such that an increase of 1% will cause a family to not be able to meet basic living expenses (under some set of assumptions) [ Of course we shouldn't do this ].

You can see how this would not be a flat percentage of one's income (because living expenses aren't a flat percentage of income, even if wealthier people live in more expensive houses).

This was important for my understanding of taxation, (although you probably are aware of all this as you are approaching justification for taxation by utility).

(Sorry for the ham-handed explanation, i'm not an economics person and it shows).

Do you take issue with progressive taxation in general, or just the current levels?

This post is mainly about rhetoric. So while i understand and agree with your desire to move past it into actually solving political problems that isn't my purpose in this post (that sounds pretty disingenuous, but bear with me).

My purpose is to talk about what i see as a social problem arising out of political rhetoric. It is about making sure things like rational empiricism and intellectualism don't get lost in the food fight that occurs as a matter of course in our political reality.

Do you think it would have been better if i had just left out the introduction and not alluded to parties? (I think it could be helpful in some ways).

Both Democrats and Republicans support Liberal policies. That is to say, they both consider individual liberty and equality to be primary goals as opposed to fascism or monarchies. Both support rational empiricism in science and technology. But at certain times, in certain venues, Liberalism and intellectualism are derided. (On the opposite side, i see the derision of the social importance of religious faith).

Clearly citizens need a better understanding of history and civics, as well as, how our country actually works as opposed to how it ideally should work. They need to understand how to use statistics (and how they are misused), and they need a basic understanding of science. They need to read what was actually written by Washington, the Framers, and the philosophers they based their views on.

Politicians should be the standard-bearers engaging in policy debates in terms of empirical
findings. (Clearly this is something the Democratic party fails at).

I agree 100% Democratic leadership and politicians have misrepresented, dissembled, and lied. They are politician.

Here's some more problems:
1. Democrats are spineless and often cannot even articulate their core principles (if they have any)
2. They are corporatist: they take care of their friends regardless of their stated ideology
3. They engage in partisan food fights at the country's expense
4. They are corrupt e.g. the various scandals in the 80's and 90's in congress.
5. They are so afraid of being labeled soft-on-X that they seem to vote out of fear rather than principle.
6. They have dismissed large swaths of our citizenry as 'backwards', or 'dumb hicks'
7. They have used minorities as a prop.
8. They have done more than a fair share of demagoguary.
9. They have repeatedly double-crossed their constituents (both right and left).
10. They have misrepresented their views.
11. They are politicians (and here i am guilty of my own demonization of the word 'politicians').
12. etc, etc, etc.

The point of the post was not how politicians have strolled us into the abyss for their own short-term gain, but how specific rhetorical
techniques have impacted Americans' feelings about important concepts, like intellectualism, taxes, unions, etc.

again thanks for you comment.

The footnote addresses just the events to which i was alluding, while the body addresses my main concern: the effect of Conservatives'/Republicans' social and campaign rhetoric on Americans' feelings about history and a few concepts in particular.

re: problem of politics, i agree.

re: my points about unions/taxes/etc, i agree they are high level and difficult to respond to. I was trying to keep it short; unfortunately, i sacrificed clarity (while still failing at the short part).

The point i hoped to make was that the historical significance (ie benefits) of each of the terms has been lost amongst spin doctors' attempts to characterize them as negatives.

re: labels vs issues, i agree.

None of you know me personally, so you'll have to take it on faith (or not), when i say that i abhor spin-doctoring, promoting appearances over substance, rhetorical shenanigans, and other
practices that distract or misrepresent the true state of things. The genesis of the essay is that the rhetoric that has been used (especially amongst the usual talk radio folks), has begun to obscure some important facts about the complexity of our history.

I am not worried about labels, per se, and i prefer to focus on issues. I am worried about the labels' effects on our ability to understand our history though.

Finally, i don't care who wins, parties come and go; they switch sides, and ebb and flow. I agree with Washington in his farewell address concerning the issues with political parties.

My main concern is that the populace understands history and how we came to be, but the Atwater legacy has begun to bite us in the ass as a society. My proposal then was to emphasize the positive aspects of the oft-maligned phrases.

(thanks).

To clarify, is your argument that the case of Herceptin is essentially different from a private insurer denying a drug or procedure because of this drugs stated efficacy? Or is it because the national recommendation sets the policy for a larger swath of the population?

As an aside, the use of monoclonal therapies is an interesting case. I suspect that in the coming decades many new therapies will be genetic ones (including stem cells, RNAi, monoclonal, etc). These are by their nature labor intensive (as they have to be created per patient) and will continue to drive up the cost until economies of scale (if any) kick in or technological advancement intercede.

I'm sorry that this might impact businesses negatively. But at some point you have to stop making excuses.

Now that's thinking outside the box. Think of the kick that will provide for the personal lubricant industry!

Could get messy though.

Rove does the same thing as when he was going on TV attempting to trash Kaine as a choice for VP during the elections.

To diminish his executive credentials, he tried to argue that Richmond was a small city. First among the list of cities larger than Richmond was Chula Vista.

I think the simplest reason that Chula Vista was named was because it's kind of silly sounding. He wanted the viewer to hear the name, laugh at it sounding dumb, and then associate or transfer some of that scorn over to Kaine/Obama.

It's actually reasonably savvy in an underhanded way. The problem is, that was pretty much all Rove/GOP had: underhanded parlor tricks.

They seem to put thin-skinned PR people in the ombudsman's job; so rather than critically looking at their organization through the lens of (ideal) journalistic integrity, they end up with these whiny, defensive, and pathetic apologetics.

I don't have a feel for what the best way to deal with poor journalists is. Such that they actually feel chastised as opposed to feeling morally justified because both sides are equally mad at them.

The options i can think of off-hand are by example (tpm does a good job of showing how poor journalists are both by spotlighting it, and juxtaposing it with good journalism), en masse barrage (like what the conservatives did through the 80's and 90's), or extremely loud scholarly reproach.

And leave Robert Reich out of this!

The only way for us to tell the difference is if we get some concrete explanations rather than the letter's vague "heavy lifting" and needs more time excuses.

I think it is important to make sure this bill reduces costs. The CBO may be full of it, but if he is, then the administration has to come out and layout a reasonable case for it along with evidence.

What is important is that this determination is made with a plan to go forward so that we reach a definite conclusion and either fix the bill or fix the Senators.

What is damning about the letter is that it lays out the case for delay, rather than a process of what needs to get done during that delay.

I think the idea in general is that taxes are levied to pay for essential services (however the people may determine those) [3].

Now, the next idea is that the tax burden should impact everyone as little as possible.

That is to say, there is some optimum way in which the tax burden can be shared so that everyone feels the pain equally (and as little as possible).

Finally, we add in the concept of marginal value[1]: The value of getting X more of something depends on how much of that something you already have. It is not constant and perhaps non-linear, often showing diminishing returns.

This means that the optimal tax rate to spread the burden is not flat. If i make $15k/yr i will have a tough time making ends meet no matter how low the tax rate is. At the same time at $60k/yr i can live pretty well with not too much effort as long as the tax rate is pretty reasonable (these are of course adjusted for cost of living).
At the very top end you could tax a very wealthy person a lot and they'd still be able to survive.
(You don't want to go overboard though, because bad things will happen socially, and socio-economically, but the point is that they can stand a higher rate before any impact is felt[2]).

So i guess this all ends up in that the marginal tax rates should reflect the marginal utility of money to some extent.

[1] I don't think this is the correct usage of the term
[2] Although if you keep repeating in the media how burdensome taxes are and how unfair it is, that point may change
[3] The essential-ness of healthcare can i think be justified in that the impacts of poor health are pervasive (consider herd immunity and vaccination similarly).

I do wish it would also list agency affiliation (NSA, FBI, CIA, Illuminati, etc). But I guess it's kind of fun to try and guess the agency each person is from.

(I'm guessing DickDay is from the League of Women voters...they have been riding my ass like chocolate riding on uhh milk duds. I think they're trying to prevent me from talking about the conspiracy between the Reptilians and H.R. Willmington, the cracker magnate, to corner the graham cracker market using alien marketing technology).

Uh oh, the UPS truck is stopping in front of my house; i think they must have heard what i was thinking. gotta go!

Is this comment some sort of Rorschach test? I'm not saying it's a bad or untrue comment, i just don't understand what you're trying to say.