How to Think About Taxes | Mother Jone

This is a great article. I’m reposting it in it’s entirety as it needs no improvement.

How to Think About Taxes

Here’s my contribution to today’s tax day festivities: an effort to get you to think about federal taxes a little bit differently than usual. Normally, when we talk about taxes, we end up talking about percentages of people: the top 1% pay a certain amount, the bottom third pay a different amount, etc. But this is the wrong way to look at things. What we ought to be looking at is percentages of income.

Have your eyes glazed over yet? Just wait! It’s going to get worse. But first a caveat: the numbers that follow aren’t exact. I don’t think they’re way off the mark, but they’re the result of some rough interpolation from several different data sources. Anyone with access to more detailed data is welcome to correct this, but in the meantime it should be close enough to give you an idea of how to look at this stuff.

So: percentages of income. What I mean by this is that you’d expect a group of people with, say, one-fifth of the nation’s total income to pay one-fifth of total federal taxes. (Note: one-fifth = 20%, or one quintile in tax-speak.) It doesn’t really matter if that group has one-fifth of the people or not, just that it has one-fifth of the money. Like this:

But hold on. That’s a flat tax, and I want to appeal to your native sense of fairness here. Even most conservatives agree that taxation ought to be at least mildly progressive, so let’s make this mildly progressive. First, let’s say that the middle quintile, almost by definition, ought to pay 20% of total taxes. Like so:

The next quintile up ought to pay a higher share, and the quintile above that even more. The slope of the increase doesn’t need to look like a hockey stick, but it should trend clearly upward. Let’s say it should be 8% more for each quintile:

Likewise, the quintile below the middle ought to pay a lower share, and the poorest quintile ought to pay even less. Something like this:

Question: does this seem roughly fair to you? If you’re a die-hard flat-taxer, it won’t, but for most people, even conservatives, it ought to seem reasonable. It’s progressive, but the slope is moderate and consistent. So now let’s take a look at the income cutoffs that produce our five quintiles. Here they are:

Most people are surprised at how high the income cutoffs are. But that’s how it works out. If you add up the incomes of every single household that makes less than $50,000 — all 50 million of them — they earn only a fifth of the total income. If you add up the tiny number of people who make more than $300,000, they also earn a fifth of total income. So now, instead of looking at our theoretical progressive system, let’s see the actual numbers. Here they are:

As you can see, when you add up all federal taxes and compare it to where the money is, our system is only barely progressive at all. The bottom quintile doesn’t do too badly, though they’re probably paying a little more than they should, but CEOs and bankers are paying only slightly more than teachers and engineers. And if you add in state and local taxes, even this small amount of progressivity goes away. You can come at this from a lot of different angles, but you always end up with the same answer: taken as a whole, our tax system is close to flat. Does this seem fair to you? It shouldn’t.

NOTE: As I said above, these numbers are rough interpolations from several sources. The high-end income data is from Piketty and Saez, here. The middle income aggregates and cutoffs are from Census figures, here and here. Tax shares are from the CBO, here.

Proposed Discretionary Budget, FY2009 | National Priorities Project

Yikes. I didn’t realize just how large a percentage of our annual federal budget has been going toward “national defense”..i.e military spending. These numbers include the “discretionary war funding” that are in addition to the normal budget. The source for this info is the white house…click the link above and click around for as much analysis as you can stomach on where your tax dollars are going.

It’s time to reign in the defense beast….we outpace every other nation on the planet by a large margin in defense spending….no one comes close. In fact, I’ve read that you can combine the defense budgets of China and Russia and still not come close to the U.S’ defense spending. Thank you Boeing. Thanks Lockheed. Thanks General Dynamics. Our sick, undereducated and jobless owe you a debt of …as do our children, and their children…..

Hemp Bill Introduced in Congress - HuffingtonPost.com

A bipartisan group of agitating members of Congress introduced legislation Thursday to allow farmers to grow industrial hemp.  HR 1866 - Industrial Hemp Farming Act

Currently eight states — Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia — allow industrial hemp production or research, but federal law, which requires nearly-impossible-to-obtain-permits to grow hemp, trumps those state laws. The new bill would allow states to craft their own policy.

Hemp, a cousin of marijuana that can’t get you stoned, is considered by the Drug Enforcement Administration to be a controlled substance because it kind of looks like pot. Synthetic fabric makers have long opposed hemp, which they see as competition.

The United States is the only nation that blocks its farmers from growing hemp, though hemp products are legal to import and to sell. Somebody would have to smoke several acres worth of hemp, which has negligible psychoactive properties, for that policy to make any sense.

But wild hemp continues to grow across the country. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan took the anti-hemp policy to its logical conclusion and ordered law enforcement to uproot wild hemp wherever it was found. It was a wild success: by 1989, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated it uprooted 120 million of the plants that year, which it referred to in government reports as “ditchweed.” In 2001, it eradicated half a billion such plants, though not even that total could get someone high. The war on ditchweed continues today, but the DEA has stopped its embarrassing habit of disclosing the total amount of useless plants it uproots.

The industrial hemp bill is being championed by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a powerful committee chairman and outspoken critic of the drug war, as well as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), a libertarian-leaning former presidential candidate suspicious of federal power. Nine other members, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s close ally, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), cosponsored the bill.

“Federal law is standing in the way of farmers in these states growing what may be a very profitable crop,” said Paul when introducing the bill.

Frank and Paul,in a letter [PDF] to congressional colleagues, note that “during World War II, the federal government encouraged industrial hemp farming to help the war effort.”

The industrial hemp bill comes as policymakers are taking a fresh look at the war on drugs in light of the very real war in Mexico between the government and rival drug cartels. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has proposed an overhaul of the criminal justice system and Attorney General Eric Holder has vowed not to prosecute medical marijuana patients and clinics that are in compliance with state law.

Though the bill faces long odds in Congress, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture has said it “supports revisions to the federal rules and regulations authorizing commercial production of industrial hemp.” The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has also passed a pro-hemp resolution.

Obama could change hemp policy without congressional action, noted Vote Hemp President Eric Steenstra. “Obama should direct the DEA to stop confusing industrial hemp with its genetically distinct cousin, marijuana. While the new bill in Congress is a welcome step, the hemp industry is hopeful that the new leadership in the White House will prioritize the crop’s benefits to farmers,” he said.

Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America

25 March 2009

Ramallah: Mustafa Barghouthi, the Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative condemned heavily yesterday Israeli aggression consisting in shutting down and beating Palestinian activists and journalist during the press conference held by the parents of Tristan Anderson, the American peace activist who was shot in Ni’lin last week.

“The boundaries of minimum respect for the victims have been crossed once again. We feel that there are no limits in the Israeli troops behaviour, no respect for the grieving of Tristan’s family”, the deputy said, shocked.

Tristan Anderson, 37 years old, an American citizen and peace activist, had an Israeli high velocity gas canister shot at his head in Ni’lin on the 13th of March. His skulls shattered several injuries and he was left in a very critical state at Tel Aviv hospital.

On Monday, during a press conference held by Tristan’s parents, a woman and a journalist were beaten by the Israeli troops. 11 persons were detained including 3 foreign peace activists.

The press conference was held in a very symbolic place, known as the ‘protest tent’, in Sheikh Jarrah, where the Al Kurd family has taken up residence for months after being evicted from their home.

Several journalists were reported being prevented to attend the conference. The Israeli army demanded that the event will be shut down. As several refused, they assaulted the audience, beating and detaining activists, media crews and officials.

“Such a raid leaves me speechless”, condemns the Deputy. ‘But we have to stand up loud. The Anderson family has the right to tell the world what Tristan has endured and express solidarity and their indignation and feelings regarding the shooting of their son. America is a country where freedom of speech is a core value. But once entering the Israeli controlled territory, nothing prevails anymore. Israeli soldiers have no shame and this should be reported. Loudly.”

James Galbraith: Obama Isnt Doing Enough to Solve the Financial Crisis | Mother Jones - CLICK ME

Here’s a cool site that let’s you think about and then calculate an estimate of how much water you personally consume per year….your “water footprint”. It’s a sobering exercise to be sure. We all know how wasteful we all are here in the US, and how flagrantly we take for granted that most essential ingredient of life, water. Now you can see it calculated for you and it will make you think. I truly believe that water resource wars will be the source of much strife in the not too distant future, so whatever we all can do to reduce our consumption is in our own best interests and those of our descendants.

Waterfootprint.org: Water footprint and virtual water