Mail 683 20110715-1

Mail 683 Friday July 15, 2011

· Your tax dollars at work

· China overtakes US?

Dear Jerry,

One new application of technology to the arts you may be interested to know

about:

In recent years I’ve had the good fortune to become water brothers with rock legend David Crosby, of the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash, Crosby-Nash, and other groups. He tells me he and Graham Nash now have a new, extremely lucrative profit center: when you leave a Crosby-Nash concert, by the time you can get your butt out of the chair and out to the lobby…they’re already waiting to sell you THE CONCERT YOU JUST HEARD on a USB thumb drive, directly from the soundboard in high quality mp3, all tracks correctly identified, nearly three hours of music you know for a fact is great, for US$40. And they get to keep ALL the money–as opposed to the miserable fraction of the ticket price (or CD price) that ever reaches them.

At the end of a tour, they’ll put EACH CONCERT up for sale at their website.

In effect, they’ve finally become their own record company. The means of production have passed into the hands of the people; all power to the people! David and Graham are both terribly pleased. It was David’s idea.

He’ll be 70 in another month, making him a Sixties Survivor twice over, and he’s hard at work on a splendid new solo album….produced by his son, James Raymond.

Be well and prosper, my friend.

–Spider Robinson

Subject: Cost of Rural Broadband Access

A study shows that the stimulus of 2009 went out and spent $350,000 per household to bring broadband to rural areas. I won’t waste your time listing the alternatives that would have cost less.

http://blogs.forbes.com/nickschulz/2011/07/05/how-effective-was-the-2009-stimulus-program/

—

Dwayne Phillips

Lie to Me –

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/spot-tsa-airport-security-program-catch-terrorist/story?id=14062893

"The U.S. government has already spent approximately $750 million on the Screening of Passengers by Technique (SPOT) program, which in part trains airport security officers to look out for "micro-expressions" of travelers that may betray nefarious planning, and plans to add another $254 million to the program in 2012"

Of course we know that not a single terrorist has been identified during TSA screening of any kind. Even so,

"But a spokesman for the TSA told ABC News that the SPOT program was just one in several layers of airport security that have successfully deterred another Sept. 11-style attack and the many arrests resulting from SPOT show that it is an effective tool in detecting deception, whether in criminals or potential terrorists." The lie that really needs detecting is the one about TSA having stopped another 9/11-style attack. A plane won’t be used as a missile again simply because it is too hard to get to the pilots now and the passengers won’t sit still for it.

R,

Rose

we also have to understand that we have the lowest individual tax rate in the industrialized world.

– depends on how we define the terms.

It is of course a side issue. Still it ought not be ignored, overlooked and put aside in discussion.

Stock ownership is now much in the hands of groups (Calpers?) such that (shades of Coase) there isn’t much of a coalition to scream about the double taxation of taxing the business income then taxing the owner’s income.

(then too much of the business income goes to senior management rather than to ownership as funds rely on appreciation over dividends another distortion in the natural course of events)

That fight about double taxation and Sub Chapter S pattern – pass the profits through and tax the owner – has been abandoned to argue about the so called death tax which mostly winds up the estate and collects on sheltered income.

Still it’s worth considering the effect if imputed income were taxed at the various individual rates – of course folks can’t pay money on imputed income they haven’t received. So we see such things as Boeing building the -80 with money that would otherwise have been paid as excess profits tax. But I digress.

The point is that to speak of individual tax rates without addressing the tax on returns on equity and on capital both at the business level and at the capital gains tax level is flat misleading and so unproductive in any ultimate sense.

Regards

CEM

==

The important point continues to be: who is more likely to invest wisely? A command economy says government experts are better able to allocate resources. This does not appear to be true. To the point:

Jerry,

If a Capitalist society is the economic equivalent of a Maxwellian gas, the command economy is the economic equivalent of a laser: it can achieve spectacular results — at the cost of wasting 95% of the total energy (productivity) of the system.

Jim

Precisely.

Of course I thought of you…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/09/psych_grads_knacked/

“A study in America has found that taking a degree in Psychology condemns you to a lifetime of being lower paid than those who study proper sciences, and lower paid than the average among university graduates.”

Of course, I don’t know if this study is “proper science” itself…

Chris

I tend to agree. My original intent as an undergraduate was to go to medical school, and a psychology degree offered the best opportunity to have a very high grade point average. Fortunately I got interested in history – Dr. George Mosse saw to that. And I was steered into a second major in European Literature and Thought, and Rupert King got me interested in ecology at a time when that was not a popular subject. I had an undergraduate assistantship with Van Allen for a while. But I did not take much in the way of hard science. After Vertebrate Embryology made it clear that I wasn’t going to get into medical school I was left with psychology – and Paul Horst promptly sent me to the math department to learn real mathematics and probability. That led to Operations Research and it was as an OR man that I was an aerospace professional even though my first aerospace job was as Aviation Psychologist and Human Factors Engineer. A varied career. I do not think an undergraduate degree in psychology is very valuable, but then my opinion of most of the “social sciences” is not high: see my Essays on The Voodoo Sciences.

China Overtakes US?

A new Pew Global Attitudes survey released today finds that while the U.S. is better regarded around the world now than it was in the Bush years, in 15 of 22 nations surveyed most say that China either will replace or already has replaced America as the world’s “leading superpower.” This view is especially widespread in Western Europe, where at least six in 10 respondents in Britain, France, Germany and Spain see China eventually overtaking the U.S.

The emerging perception of China’s superpower status no doubt reflects global recognition of its growing economic might, and the fact that the U.S. is increasingly seen as trailing China economically. Nowhere is this more evident than in Western Europe, where the percentage naming China as the world’s “leading economic power” has increased markedly over the past two years, along with the view that it will ultimately eclipse the U.S. as global superpower.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303678704576442400450218990.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

——– Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Not astonishing. Regretable, but not astonishing. Walter Lippman once said that diplomacy is akin to writing checks; actual military and economic power are the bank accounts against which those checks are written. We have drained both of those accounts.

Apparently, David Slater, a well-known nature photographer, left his camera on the ground in an Indonesian national park, and a macaque monkey walked over and snapped a bunch of photos, including this (remarkable!) self-portrait:

MONKEY SELF-PORTRAIT

Cheers,

Dan

Bastille

Jerry,

Not to forget that DeSade himself spent years in the Bastille. In 1777, Sade was tricked into visiting his supposedly ill mother, who in fact had recently died, in Paris. He was arrested there and imprisoned in the Château de Vincennes. He successfully appealed his death sentence in 1778 but remained imprisoned under the lettre de cachet. He escaped but was soon recaptured. He resumed writing and met fellow prisoner Count de Mirabeau who also wrote erotic works.

In 1784, Vincennes was closed and Sade was transferred to the Bastille. On 2 July 1789, he reportedly shouted out from his cell, to the crowd outside, "They are killing the prisoners here!" causing something of a riot. Two days later, he was transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton near Paris, and missed the major event of the French Revolution on 14 July.

Henry Barth

Dublin