Randall Munroe highlights The Maritime Approximation:
I just have to point out that "The Maritime Approximation" would have been a good title for a seagoing episode of The Big Bang Theory.
And, yes, of course Wikipedia has a List of The Big Bang Theory episodes. Nothing "maritime", but they had three "approximations": "The Einstein Approximation" (Season 3 Episode 14); "The Prestidigitation Approximation" (Season 4 Episode 18); and "The Expedition Approximation" (Season 8 Episode 6).
And now on to less important matters:
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Reliably making an ass of herself. We talked about Senator Warren's "but" yesterday, but her fellow progressive wasn't far "behind" in scraping the "bottom" of the argument barrel. Jeffrey Blehar notes: AOC Casts Her Vote for Elizabeth Warren and Team 'But'. (Emphasis added.)
So, let’s also proudly induct Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the club, for today she chose disgrace. In an interview outside the Capitol this afternoon, Ocasio-Cortez went on the record with her take on the Thompson murder, and, much like Elizabeth Warren, she likes big “buts” and she cannot lie:
This is not to say that an act of violence is justified, but I think for anyone who is confused or shocked or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them. People go homeless over the financial devastation of a diagnosis that doesn’t get addressed. When we talk about how systems are violent in this country, in this passive kind of way, our health care system is like that for a huge amount of Americans.
As I am often fond of saying, Read that one again, folks. Amazingly, Ocasio-Cortez’s response somehow managed to be almost as repulsive as Warren’s while remaining perfectly in sync with it. (You have to hand it to AOC: She’s not about to be outperformed by some shriveled bag of bones like Warren in the “Most Viably Progressive” branding sweepstakes on the Left.) Being told “no” by an insurance company — something I have been told many times, with no better answer to turn to — is now commensurate to an act of violence, and for no other reason than the fact that we culturally ceded the commonsense definition of the term to activists and affectedly wounded fauns like Ocasio-Cortez over a decade ago. What does the “violence” of pumping five slugs into the back of a stranger merely for holding the wrong symbolic job really mean, Ocasio-Cortez asks us to consider, compared with the “passive kind” of violence of the health care system?
I say: throw the "bums" out.
(Yes, sometimes against my better judgment, I decide to live
updown to this blog's title.)
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They are mythapprehensions. There are probably more than ten of them, all told, but Brian Riedl picks the low-hanging fruit at the Manhattan Institute: Correcting the Top 10 Tax Myths.
Picking at random, let's look at Myth 7: “Taxing Millionaires and Corporations Can Eliminate the Deficit”:
Just as “tax cuts for the rich” are falsely blamed for causing nearly all budget deficits, it is commonly claimed that raising taxes on corporations and wealthy families can eliminate budget deficits and even finance a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Once again, the uncompromising math shows otherwise.
Let’s begin with an extreme example. Even seizing all the wealth from America’s 800 billionaires—every home, business, investment, car, and yacht—and somehow reselling it all for full market value would raise only enough revenue to finance the federal government one time for eight months (while cratering the stock market, where much of that wealth had been held).[23] Taxing million-dollar earners at 100% marginal tax rates would not balance the long-term budget even if each of these taxpayers continued working for zero net pay. Only slightly more realistically, a Bernie Sanders–style tax agenda consisting of federal income-tax rates as high as 52%, capital-gains tax rates of 62%, a 35% corporate tax that includes all multinational income, a 12.4% Social-Security payroll tax on wages above $250,000, a wealth tax at a rate as high as 8%, an estate-tax rate as high as 77%, new financial transaction taxes, and countless other surtaxes and tax increases would raise, at most, 2% of GDP in tax revenues out of a current-policy budget deficit heading to 9% of GDP in a decade and 14% of GDP in three decades.[24] Even those revenue figures implausibly assume that people and corporations would continue working, saving, and investing, despite combined (federal and state) marginal tax rates on labor and investment approaching 80% to 100%. Actual tax revenues would likely increase by closer to 1% of GDP.
The mathematical reality is that there are simply not enough millionaires, billionaires, and undertaxed corporations to close a 30-year budget deficit of $115 trillion–$180 trillion (depending on the baseline used). A federal tax system that set every “tax the rich” policy dial at its revenue-maximizing levels—without regard to the resulting economic damage—could raise, at most, 1%–2% of GDP in new revenues (while surely killing jobs and lowering wages across the economy). Obviously, deficit reduction should put all policies on the table, including some new upper-income taxes. However, middle-class taxes finance most of Europe’s exorbitant spending levels, and they would have to provide the bulk of any tax-heavy solution to America’s budget deficits.
See if Brian debunked your favorite myth. And he includes eight "smaller myths" after the top ten.
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Your tax wampum at work. Jerry Coyne is slightly dismayed by yet another lame-duck initiative from the current paleface in the White House: Indigenous knowledge and climate change: a new collaboration.
Will Indigenous knowledge, as instantiated in Native North American tribal “ways of knowing”, help ameliorate climate change? One would think “not much” because anthropogenic climate change, now a virtual certainty, is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases, and it’s hard to imagine that Native Americans either generate much of those gases or have any knowledge to slow their accumulation, which derives mostly from industrial countries.
But the Biden administration thinks otherwise, perhaps for two reasons: the “progressive” sacralization of indigenous people and their knowledge, and, second, the assumption that Native American knowledge, which derived largely from finding empirical ways of making a living (when to grow food, how to hunt, etc.), made them “stewards of the environment.” The latter isn’t really the case, as Native Americans engaged in several practices, among them overhunting of bison and overburning of the prairie and woodlands (the latter also was done to facilitate hunting). At any rate, a reader sent me a link to the right-wing Free Beacon site below that reports a last-minute Biden Administration initiative to meld modern science with Native American ways of knowing to attack the problem of climate change. Below that is the press release from the Administration that gives details and links to the official government memorandum of collaborating with indigenous people.
Jerry's a liberal in good standing, and his distaste at linking to the Free Beacon is palpable. But here you go: Biden Orders Scientific Agency To Expand Use of 'Indigenous Knowledge' in Final Days.
Elon? Vivek?
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Well, that's a shame. Jack Nicastro notes the Supreme Court Punts on Racial Discrimination Case.
The Supreme Court declined to hear Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence Corp. v. The School Committee for the City of Boston (Boston Parent) on Monday. The court's refusal to take up the case is bad news because it leaves unresolved a circuit split on what constitutes a violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.
The Boston Parent Coalition sued the city of Boston in February 2021 for changes to the admissions process for Boston's prestigious "exam schools," which they allege were intended to decrease the number of admitted white and Asian students. These allegations are evidenced by the Exam School Admissions Criteria Working Group's "Projected Shift" chart, which accurately predicted the exam schools' altered racial composition, and by a member of the group telling the Boston School Committee that the new system would "allow our exam schools to more closely reflect the racial and economic makeup of Boston's kids," per PLF's opening brief.
Apparently, the Boston School Committee successfully argued that they had changed their admission policy so it wasn't quite so racially discriminatory, rendering the case moot. So Constitutional clarity on this will have to wait.
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Vero's more optimistic than I. Despite Trump's denials that he would do anything to Uncle Stupid's entitlement programs, she says: Don't Write Off DOGE. Sample:
Medicaid and Medicare are the source of at least $100 billion a year in fraud and over $100 billion annually in improper payments. Obviously, ending fraud should be a priority. And according to the Government Accountability Office, 74% of improper payments are simple overpayments. However, the government is making little effort to recover the funds.
In fact, to the extent that any effort is expended, it's by health care providers (mostly hospitals who are large beneficiaries of Medicare's fee-for-service improper payments) and Congress, who try to slow down the rate of improper payment recovery by audit contractors. Why we should tolerate such a scandal, I don't know.
Nor do I.