Piketty on how American policy has changed

The Guardian is running another fascinating piece by Thomas Piketty, putting historical perspective on American tax rates.   Read it all:  like Krugman, he really knows how to make a very plausible argument:

Let’s glance back for an instant. From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 – for half a century – the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagan’s election in 1980.

This policy in no way affected the strong growth of the post-war American economy, doubtless because there is not much point in paying super-managers $10m when $1m will do. The estate tax, which was equally progressive with rates applicable to the largest fortunes in the range of 70% to 80% for decades (the rate has almost never exceeded 30% to 40% in Germany or France), greatly reduced the concentration of American capital, without the destruction and wars which Europe had to face.

A mythical capitalism

In the 1930s, long before European countries followed through, the US also set up a federal minimum wage. In the late 1960s it was worth $10 an hour (in 2016 dollars), by far the highest of its time.

All this was carried through almost without unemployment, since both the level of productivity and the education system allowed it. This is also the time when the US finally put an end to the undemocratic legal racial discrimination still in place in the south, and launched new social policies.

All this change sparked a muscular opposition, particularly among the financial elites and the reactionary fringe of the white electorate. Humiliated in Vietnam, 1970s America was further concerned that the losers of the second world war (Germany and Japan in the lead) were catching up at top speed. The US also suffered from the oil crisis, inflation and under-indexation of tax schedules. Surfing the waves of all these frustrations, Reagan was elected in 1980 on a program aiming to restore a mythical capitalism said to have existed in the past.

The culmination of this new program was the tax reform of 1986, which ended half a century of a progressive tax system and lowered the rate applicable to the highest incomes to 28%.

The bold is mine, because it reminded me of Trump (and Cruz), the two appalling lead contenders for the Republican presidential candidacy.

Meanwhile, I wonder what Australian right wing, small government economists are talking about?

Oh, they're blaming Obama for Muslim inspired instability throughout the world, and still fretting obsessively about numbers on a government website to do with plain packaging of tobacco.  (To be fair to poor old Sinclair, I think he has given up on Kates as having any political sense whatsoever.)

Update:  look at the appalling tax plans of the Republican candidates.  As the article notes about Cruz in particular:

...the plan would cost more than Bush or Rubio's proposals but somewhat less than Trump's. Including both lost revenue and interest, Cruz's plan would cost $10.2 trillion over 10 years. Bush's costs $8.1 trillion, Rubio's $8.2 trillion, and Trump's $11.2 trillion. In its first decade, Cruz's plan would increase the debt by 35.7 percent of GDP; over two decades, that figure rises to 68.7. The current level is about 100 percent of GDP, so Cruz would spike it dramatically. And even more than his rival's plans, Cruz's concentrates its benefits heavily among the richest Americans....

The sheer cost of Cruz's plan is also worth dwelling on. If unpaid for, it increases the deficit by more than $1 trillion a year, and would require about $860 billion a year in spending cuts to avoid that. And Cruz has said he wants to balance the budget, so spending cuts are how the plan would have to be paid for if he keeps that promise.

Those are truly epic spending cuts. Again, Cruz needs $860 billion less spending every year. By comparison, eliminating Medicaid entirely would only save about $500 billion a year. Eliminating Obama's subsidies would only save $92.5 billion.

The biggest economic menace to America is Republican economic ideology.

When will they come back to some common sense?

Current dissatisfactions

A list of things I am currently dissatisfied about:

1.  My shoulder.  It still hurts from a simply executed backwards wrench in the surf on New Year's Day.   Maybe worth a post of its own...

2.   The new X Files - last week's episode ("Home Again") was unnecessarily violent, overly dramatic with Scully, and had a stupid, utterly unrealistic monster with no proper explanation.

3.  Scully's centre hair part in the X Files.   Sure, she's supposed to be smart, but seeing what looks like 15 cm of forehead is just too much.   Bangs, Scully:  bangs.

4.  How long it is taking for Malcolm Turnbull to get his act together.   Feels like we're watching a drifting ship of state, with a slowly increasing rate of escapees on life boats.  (Except for Abbott, who actually deserves to be tossed overboard, perhaps with a life jacket if I'm feeling generous.)

5.  My inability to read books due to:

     a.  the "I'm sure I'll find something interesting soon" stream of new information on the internet;
     b.  getting sleepy pretty quickly when I try to read.

I used to deal with the latter adequately by doing things like reading books in a park during lunch times at university, or on the beach during school holidays.   Now that I mainly try to read while in the house, it's harder.

6.  Aging men who chant "the war on drugs has failed", and  shrug their shoulders about the dance party drug culture scene.  Last night's Four Corners was as po-faced as it comes with ex federal police, Nicholas Cowdery, and (of course) party doctor Alex Wodak all saying its hopeless to try to stop it.   All instead of doing what older men and women are supposed to do:  decry a culture of self indulgent, hedonistic, extended adolescence that mature people in past times would have said is bad for society and individuals and should be stopped.    Just ban dance parties:  with the lock out laws we're already half way there to crushing this degeneracy, aren't we?    And seriously - it is degeneracy.  Can't convince me otherwise.  

7.   Channel Ten doing its utmost to ruin the viewing experience of The X Files.   It's appalling, the ads that take up at least a quarter of the bottom of the screen while Scully is mourning (with unconvincing acting) the death of her mother.

8.   That my list of dissatisfactions is full of X Files related complaints.

9.   The lack of good, intriguing new UFO cases.   The last one I can recall was the really weird incident at O'Hare airport in 2006.   Ten years is a long time between good UFO sightings.

10.  Reading newspapers on the net.  Last Saturday, I found myself the only person in a South Brisbane bar, enjoying a craft beer and reading a Sydney Morning Herald that had been left there.   I subscribe to the SMH digitally, but I had forgotten how much more satisfying, and better informed I feel, after spending 45 to 60 minutes reading a physical paper, compared to the digital experience.   Firstly, with digital subscription it still feels like you're only getting half the articles that appear in the hard version.  Maybe I'm wrong - but there seems to be a lot more in the hard paper.   Secondly, digital reading is all about the eye scanning mere snippets of information and moving on in a way that reading a hard copy discourages.   You just feel smarter for the experience of spending time with an actual newspaper.   I really wish we had something such that we saw on Minority Report:   a flexible plastic large format reader which could download any paper and present it in tabloid format sized pages.   Perhaps such a reader does exist, but is considered too specialised a use to ever market.  (And certainly, it could be a pain to carry around all day just to be able to read it on the train on the way to work.   Maybe it needs foldability?)  But yeah, I think we're losing something valuable by going purely digital with newspapers, even with tablets.
          

Noted at The Onion

Obama Compiles Shortlist Of Gay, Transsexual Abortion Doctors To Replace Scalia

 WASHINGTON—Moving quickly to begin the process of filling the unexpected
vacancy on the Supreme Court bench, President Obama spent much of the
weekend compiling a shortlist of gay, transsexual abortion doctors to
replace the late Antonin Scalia, White House sources confirmed Monday.
“These are all exemplary candidates with strong homosexual values and
proven records of performing partial-birth abortions, but am I missing
anyone?” Obama reportedly asked himself while reviewing his list of
queer, gender-nonconforming, feminist Planned Parenthood employees, all
of whom were also said to be black immigrants. “I definitely have enough
post-op transsexuals on the list, but it is a little light on pre-op
candidates. And I should probably add a cop killer or two on here just
to round out my options.” Sources later confirmed that Obama was
attempting to rapidly narrow the list down to the single best nominee to
submit to the Senate in hopes of wrapping up confirmation hearings
before his choice had to leave to attend the Hajj pilgrimage.

 Of course, about 20% of Tea Party voters will believe this is all true.

Mice in the news

*  Important research news from Japan:   

A trio of researchers working in Japan has found via experiments they conducted, that male virgin mice prefer to watch videos of other mice fighting with one another, than videos of mice having sex.

 *  Nature.com, which seems to run a lot of stories about the relatively recent realisation that a lot of mice based medical research has been stuffed up for decades by the researchers not housing or caring for their furry subjects in the same way, has another story about this.   (It's funny how long it can take smart people to realise they are overlooking something important.)

*   Mice seem to have an odd brain structure that "throttles" violent rage:

New evidence shows mice have a brain structure that throttles rage.
The structure is called the lateral septum. It’s physically connected to and receives electrical signals other parts of the brain that control emotions, learning, aggression, and hormone production.
Damage to the lateral septum can trigger a cascade of activity in other brain regions that produced “septal rage.” These sudden, violent acts, mostly attacks on other mice, have long been seen in rodents with a damaged lateral septum, and in some birds, researchers say.
“Our latest findings show how the lateral septum in mice plays a gatekeeping role, simultaneously ‘pushing down the brake’ and ‘lifting the foot off the accelerator’ of violent behavior,” says study senior investigator Dayu Lin, an assistant professor at New York University.
Lin emphasizes that septal rage is not known to occur in humans, but that studying male aggression in mice might help to map the circuitry involved in controlling other forms of aggression, including violent behavior in humans.

*  Another Japanese mice study indicating that staying hungry may help with better ageing:

Researchers in Japan have showed that stimulating secretion of the ‘hunger hormone’, ghrelin, in mice using the traditional Japanese Kampo medicine rikkunshito had beneficial effects on aging-related diseases. The article was published in Molecular Psychiatry. ...

Previous studies have shown that caloric restriction (CR)—reducing calorie intake without incurring malnutrition or a reduction in essential nutrients—slows aging and delays functional decline as well as the onset of some diseases. Ghrelin, which regulates energy metabolism, is secreted in the stomach in response to CR and fasting.

Insecure

Lawrence Mooney harasses.... female journalist for Adelaide Fringe review

I think Mooney can be somewhat likeable as host of Dirty Laundry Live, but I did see him do some live stand up show on TV recently, and I didn't care for it at all. 

[By the way, why do so many comedians, when it comes to doing stage comedy, have to dramatically increase the swearing and ribaldry compared to how they present in other forums?   Mooney wasn't the worst in this regard, but he did spend an awful lot of time discussing his regret at his infant circumcision in a way that wasn't particularly funny, or made much sense.]

And to be honest, I didn't sense that the theatre audience was into it as much as he might have thought they were.

So I am inclined to think that the short review linked above may be about right, and that by his reaction Mooney has shown himself up as an insecure guy (or jerk, if you will) who should get out of that form of performance.

Goodbye Tim

What have I said about Tim Wilson before?  That his primary talent and interest is self promotion?

Nothing much changing, then.   But has he got his head screwed on right?   When you look at the work experience of his main competition for the seat:

Ms Downer is a lawyer turned diplomat who served in Australia's embassy in Japan for four years. The mother of two has a Masters in Public International Law from the London School of Economics and degrees in Law and Commerce from the University of Melbourne. She is fluent in Japanese and French.
A member of the Victorian Liberal Party's administrative committee, she also made regular appearances on The Bolt Report...

Versus "I used to work for the IPA, got an ill defined job with the HRC with lots of travel with the primary purpose of annoying Lefties, and take a selfie at least every second day"?  I mean seriously, if the Liberals select him over her, they'll want their head read.

But, in a spirit of generosity that I don't like to show him, he at least made the right call on the matter of the government's unwarranted attack on Save the Children staff on Nauru.

Suddenly sounded credible on tax

Chris Bowen and Bill Shorten are currently on the front foot.

I happened to see Shorten in Question Time last week before Stuart Robert got dumped, and he looked really confident and impressive.  (The government benches decidedly glum, as they do when they know the inevitable will happen, just that they have to wait for a bit of process to finish.)

Chris Bowen is also sounding very on top of his game, too, on the new negative gearing/CGT policy.

This is looking like how policy development and announcement should be done, for a change.

And Rupert's hobby paper The Australian is showing signs of being worried, wheeling out Sloan and Ergas in the one edition today to attack Labor for daring to have a policy other than merely "cut spending." 

(I don't subscribe, so it's hard to tell for sure, but I think by the looks of its website, the paper has become more like the Daily Telegraph since Whittaker took over.  And we all thought Chris Mitchell was bad...)

Shaving cont.

A pretty good explanation

Gravitational waves: A triumph for big science - BBC News

I thought this explanation of how the gravity wave detection was achieved is clear and understandable.

I'm not all that excited about it, though:  I mean, if every single other test of general relativity had been proved, there wasn't any reason to suspect gravity waves wouldn't be detected, eventually, was there?

Yes it's a brilliant technical achievement, but of itself, I can't see it leading anywhere new in particular.

A studio's deceptive advertising?

Unlike some people, I tend to read some reviews of movies before I see them.  Hence I know that I won't be going to see Marvel's Deadpool, because it's said to be hyper-violent, sweary and have relatively strong sex scenes, even if it is of genre (funny superhero) that I sometimes like.  It has an R rating in the US and  MA15+ here, which means under 15 year olds must be accompanied by an adult.

But - the TV advertisements that have been running in Australia give absolutely no idea that it is a very adult audience film.   It is in fact so blatantly bland - giving the impression that it's just a somewhat comedic superhero who suits up like Spiderman - that I reckon it's virtually deceptive advertising.  The fact that it is from Marvel compounds the problem.  (The film is not from Disney, but how many people think it might be?)

I would say it is a near certainty that there are going to be some parents (Dads, probably) who are going to take their 10 to 14 year old sons to see this, having no idea that the content is not age appropriate.  Same thing with DVD hire (or streaming viewing) in future.

Hasn't anyone else noticed this?

Update:  I suppose the same claim could have been made to similar films like Kick-Ass, except I don't really remember any television advertisements in prime time for that film at all, and I guess the very title indicated a teen to adult audience.

Also - The Guardian writes at length about how the Deadpool character is meant to be "pansexual", yet spends the movie only having sex with his girlfriend.   I guess kids get more than their fair share of pansexuality if they watch Doctor Who, but it still might be a confusing factor for a 10 or 12 year old viewer.

Touch the mango

China's curious cult of the mango - BBC News

Gee, the BBC website has a knack for bringing us obscure and odd bits of history from 20th century communism.   Last week, it was the secret Soviet analysis of Mao's poop;  this week it is the very strange period in which mangoes (re) gifted by Mao gained a semi-sacred status.

New CO2 removal ideas

Emissions reduction: Scrutinize CO2 removal methods : Nature News & Comment

Not a bad article here, looking at some old (and new) ideas for removing CO2.  I had missed this odd one, for example:

More recently, other, potentially more controllable, ocean-based CO₂-removal techniques have been suggested, such as the cultivation of seaweed to cover up to 9% of the global ocean¹²

I suppose as long as it was edible varieties, it could help feed the planet too.

But all of these ideas have to work on such a massive scale, they all appear implausible, for now.

Doubts arise

I hadn't read anything about the CSIRO Chief Executive Larry Marshal until his decision to cut hard into his organisation's climate change arm.

But this morning, he well and truly put himself in the "intellectually suspect" list when he complained that the reaction against his decision "almost sounds more like religion than science to me."   What a foolish thing to do: use a favourite climate change denial line when he says he is upset that people are claiming he's a closet climate change skeptic!

Actually, I did notice a headline from last year about him at The Australian's website recently, but I didn't follow up on it.  The story is, however,  that he has some serious sounding troubles lingering from his time in venture capital and high tech start ups.  Have a read here and here.

And even the Australian Skeptics have their doubts about him, over statements he has made that he thinks there just might be something to water divining!   (I'm sympathetic to, and interested in, many paranormal and weird science claims, but water divining is one of the easiest things to test, and am pretty sure that no one has ever shown convincing evidence it worked.)

The Abbott legacy

State governments are about to hike up taxes

A good, clear column from Peter Martin about how the Commonwealth is leaving it up to the States to raise taxes for essential health and education funding.  Although I blame Abbott, mostly, I have to admit that the Labor "no GST increase" position at the Federal level is compounding the problem.

Self explanatory..

Worrying signs

Maybe this was understood by others before now, but until this morning I didn't understand why some seemed concerned about on going low oil prices for the global economy.

Someone on Radio National, who sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, said that it may be a short term good, but the problem is that banks have lent a huge amount of money to companies with  projects (mining, gas) which are not viable if oil prices stay so low.  Big defaults are possible, seemed to be the message.

I see now that Paul Krugman is sounding nervous about the bond market, too.  Not that I understand the bond market, but Krugman is generally sensible, and if he's thinks its a bad sign, I'll take his word for it.

Not that there is anything that I can do about it.

Libertarian identity crisis

Poor old Lionel Shriver, the American (female) author who is usually pretty well reviewed, has written an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled "I Am Not a Kook" about her annoyance that people consider her self proclaimed status as a libertarian as a sign of kookiness:

When I announced to my mother in the 1980s that I considered myself libertarian, she recoiled. How did people like me come to seem like kooks?

She seems a smart woman, but perhaps she needs a few pointers, such as these:

*  Ayn Rand is associated with American libertarianism, and she was an eccentric trashy writer who fetishised powerful men getting their own way, economically and sexually, and suggested that people who didn't get on board (a train pun for you there) with her views probably deserved to die because of their own laziness and stupidity.  

*  A libertarian philosophy of minimal government leads to policies that Shriver admits she doesn't like.   She thinks gun control is a good idea;  she had a positive experience with the UK "single payer" health system;  she acknowledges that markets alone are not likely to deal adequately with climate change, which she believes in.   Shriver tries to defend her positions by arguing that no one is politically pure, and all of us can be a tad inconsistent with what policy positions we favour despite our claimed political philosophy.

But seriously, Ms Shriver - look at what the political and economic leaders who adopt libertarianism as their mantle actually believe in, both here and in Australia. 

They believe in the loosest gun control laws possible, and (as with David Leyonhjelm) celebrate instances of citizens shooting (and killing) robbers as if the wild West is something to be emulated.   There answer to every mass gun shooting is that there should be more guns.  

They not only really, seriously, believe in doing nothing about climate change;  they (see Koch brothers, of course) actively fund climate change denial to make political action on it as difficult as possible.   They are treating the single greatest environmental issue the planet has ever seen, with the possible consequence (amongst other things) of flooding scores of the worlds great cities within a century or two, because of short-sighted selfishness and an imagined socialist conspiracy against capitalism.

In the American case, they ridicule "socialised medicine" against all the evidence that the American system is incredibly expensive with (in many cases) worse outcomes overall.   But this counts little for rich libertarians with the money to get the best treatment.

It's pretty obvious, isn't it:  libertarianism downplays "the common good" in theory and, for most self proclaimed libertarians who have achieved leadership positions in the US and Australia, in practice. 

The real problem here is that I reckon Shriver should not even claim the title of libertarian, given her preferred policies are sufficient in number, and so wildly different from what other libertarians think on the same issues, that she step away from the official title due to it indeed justifying policies that are just too kooky.  

And, of course, I would say the same to Jason Soon, who I assume could write a very similar column to Shriver's.

Another bit of American Right nonsense

Everyone knows that the Republicans make stupid statements about "socialised health care", and Ted Cruz repeated the old memes only last week, to much criticism.

And here is a chart I found from 2014, which is interesting:

Why are the Republicans (and those in Australia who admire them) so full of nonsense?

Liberal Democrat eccentrics

I see that the Senator Blofeld Party recently had its national conference, with speakers including former Laborite (now conservative friendly) fellow baldy Michael Costa saying this, apparently:

'People want EVERYONE ELSE to use public transport so they can use their CAR"

I don't know when exactly it happened, but along with their climate change denialism, much of the Right wing has gone a bit nuttily against public transport, against the evidence (such as good usage figures for the Gold Coast light rail, and  Sydney's light rail having high demand.)   One would also have thought that travel to cities with great public transport systems would help convince them too.  But no.  Apparently, Houston is gold standard for cities, because land is cheap and you can spend your day commuting on a really, really wide freeway. Beautiful.

Their other speaker of note was Jennifer Marohasy - IPA aligned "independent scientist" who thinks the weather bureau is conspiring to fake our climate record, and that no understands the Murray-Darling like she does.

Way to go with the eccentrics and cranks, Leyonhjelm.  I guess you fit right in, though...

Perhaps a bigger development than what's happened in the West

In China, gays say life has changed much for the better - CSMonitor.com

If there is significant cultural change in China on the matter of acceptance of homosexual relationships, about the only major country really holding out against it aggressively would be (by my reckoning) Russia.   (Well, if you don't count the Muslim dominated countries, I suppose.  Not sure how they are ever going to cope with the idea.  Oh, and then there is a large conservative contingent in India, too.   In both cases, though, it seems that single men having opportunistic sex with males is increased by the strong conservative attitude keeping  heterosexual sex strictly within marriage.  All sort of ironic, in its way...)