Kamala Harris has pledged to increase taxes on the wealthy should she be elected president. Per the Kiplinger Newsletter, she would bring back the top 39.6% income tax rate for people making $400,000 or more, as well as hike the 3.8% net investment income surtax to 5% for these taxpayers. She also plans to increase the long-term capital gains tax rate for the wealthy.
Should Kamala Harris’s election and tax plans come to fruition, US physicians would take a major tax hit. Why? Because they’re rich.
Given that individual income taxes cover almost half of federal spending, I thought it reasonable to expect income taxes to cover around half the cost of servicing the federal debt, roughly $500 billion this year. Which led me to the following back-of-the-envelope calculations...
Power makes it easier to get what you want. Power gets you even more of what you want. Power gets you things you didn’t know you wanted. Power opens up a world of expanding possibility.
What to do about this China situation? Not huge, broad-based tariffs, which would hurt the US economy, increase global poverty, and create an anti-US backlash. Not going to war to save Taiwan, which would lead to massive fatalities, with the US losing anyway. Not relentless lecturing of China on human rights, which would continue to fall on deaf ears.
Unfortunately, many proposed fixes to the US national debt problem focus on raising income and capital gains taxes on the very affluent and rich. Politically and emotionally satisfying, perhaps, but the revenue proceeds are bound to disappoint. Besides the distortive and unpredictable effects of such taxes, there simply are not enough high-income taxpayers to fill tax coffers to the required level.
At $35 trillion and rising, the national debt seems to threaten America’s economic future…But how serious is the US national debt, really? That is, does it pose a major risk to the nation’s economic growth and undermine our ability to maintain essential government programs? And will these problems be difficult to fix given US politics and the scale of the mess?
Nibbling at the edge of a mystery, trying to reach the core of some truth. I can taste what seems like progress but can’t see the fruit, so have no idea how much longer it will take.
My distinction between insider and outsider perspectives comes from 20th century anthropology, which used the terms emic and etic to make the same distinction…What I’ve learned from reading about patriotism in America is that emic and etic descriptions tend to be worlds apart.
By 2023, US Fish and Wildlife and other US agencies had adopted a wildlife management framework called Resist-Accept-Direct, or RAD. The RAD framework allows natural resource managers the option to actively shape “change in ecosystem composition, structure, processes, or function toward preferred new conditions” (Schuurman et al, 2022). That option allows moving species outside their historic range, to benefit the receiving ecosystem, the migrating species, or both.
Surveys often ask about people’s beliefs. But what are the respondents giving them - factual or symbolic beliefs?
According to the Census Bureau, California and Texas have the largest urban populations in the country. Violent crime rates tend to be higher in urban than rural areas. That’s probably why Texas and California have much higher rates of violent crime compared to the other states in these charts.
Yes, my example is old. But I still encounter that binary mindset just about every day: variations on we’re smart, they’re dumb; we’re good; they’re bad; we see the truth, they’re deluded.
The FBI’s crime rates are based on arrests, whereas people in these states’ Criminal Legal System have been convicted of crimes. What I’d like to see is how much arrest rates diverge from conviction rates, and why they diverge, e.g., plea deals, diversion programs, prosecutorial discretion/approach to criminal justice, overzealous police over-arresting without sufficient evidence, etc. I imagine the prevalence of these various factors vary according to state, jurisdiction and local politics.
Does that mean science writers should avoid expressing opinions regarding the significance of whatever they’re writing about? No, but they should do so in the spirit of science: with an abundance of caution and plenty of hedging. Above all, they need to take care not to mislead or exaggerate.
“Anita Kunz’s cover for the July 22, 2024, issue focuses on what appears to many to be an existential threat to democracy: the far-right shift of the Supreme Court, and the conservative movement’s plans to commandeer it” - Anita Kunz’s “The Face of Justice”: The remaking of the Supreme Court in Donald Trump’s image. By Françoise Mouly/The New Yorker July 15, 2024.
As for the other countries, I detect themes of historic struggle followed by triumph, of creating something grand out of initially slim pickins; in other words, a feeling of having overcome adversity. Maybe that feeling is essential to pride in general, whether personal or national.
This series of posts will focus on what patriotism means to people who consider themselves patriotic. For example, what beliefs, perceptions, principles, values, ideals, actions and emotions come to mind when they feel the swell of patriotism or explain why they consider themselves patriotic. I will not be defining patriotism, but will approach this project in the spirit of a descriptive dictionary, which…
Per Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to support is to favor actively. However, the qualifier “somewhat” is a hedge, reflecting mixed feelings or reservations. To “somewhat support” means to partly support - it definitely does not mean wholehearted endorsement. The above headlines mislead because they imply that most poll respondents wholeheartedly endorsed the President’s Plan. They did not - and how could they? Only 23% of survey respondents indicated they have seen, read, or heard “a lot” about the Plan, of which some unknown subset supported it (with or without reservations).
Evidence is information that serves to support or counter a proposition about reality. If objective reality exists, then we can get closer to its truth through the gathering and evaluation of evidence. Evaluating evidence is a kind of interrogation. For example, one could “interrogate” opinion pieces, news analyses, and science stories with questions like…
If we made such questioning a habit, the better we’d get at glimpsing bits of the world as it is, rather than how we want or expect it to be.
In another study, participants who reported trust in science were more likely to believe and disseminate false claims that contain scientific references than false claims that do not. The study authors conclude that ‘trust in science, although desirable in many ways, makes people vulnerable to pseudoscience” (O'Brien, Palmer, et al., 2021).