The subheading from this article:
Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...
Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...
Labelling it a “tax on foreign capital”, the analysis said a company tax cut to 25 per cent would increase employment in the long run by 0.1 per cent, equivalent to about 12,000 jobs, and boost real wages 1.1 per cent.0.1% is supposed to be impressive??
Janine Dixon, a researcher at Victoria University, last month challenged the orthodox view, finding gross domestic product and workers’ wages would rise but not by enough to make up for the transfer of government revenue to foreigners, which could no longer be spent on public services.
“The right indicator of national benefit is the impact of a company tax rate cut on national income and that’s clearly negative,” she said.Of course, there is the fact that Ken Henry was a supporter of a company tax cut to 25% to make us "more competitive with Asia." On the other hand, the US doesn't exactly seem crippled by its corporate tax rate, although no doubt there is the argument that big corporations find motivation for their off shore tax shenanigans in the relatively high tax rate.
Donald Trump isn’t going to be president.: Donald Trump begins the general election with a huge deficit in head-to-head polls, deep unpopularity, and major demographic headwinds. Unless he wins unprecedented shares of black and Latino voters, or, barring any improvement with nonwhite voters, unless he wins unprecedented shares of white voters, he loses. And he has to do this while running as the most unpopular nominee in 30 years of polling. He has to do it while running against a Democratic Party operating at full strength, with popular surrogates (including a former president) crisscrossing the country against his campaign. He has to do it with a divided Republican Party. He has to do it while somehow tempering his deep-seated misogyny and racism. All this, again, in a growing economy with a well-liked president—solid conditions for a Democratic candidate.
Donald Trump has to become a radically different person to win.
Donald Trump isn’t going to win.
Why should we believe this when none of the other budget projections have come to pass? We are expected to believe that nominal GDP growth, the key driver of revenue, will jump from 2¼ per cent this financial year to 4¼ per cent next year and 5 per cent per annum thereafter. Note that nominal GDP grew by only 1.6 per cent in 2014-15.In other words, it is quite on the cards that the Budget will suffer the same fate as those under Swan - based on cheery Treasury forecasts which don't sound all that likely, and will have to be revised downwards.
The reasoning behind this optimism is Treasury’s view that the economic output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) must eventually narrow. However, any significant hiccup in the world economy or China means the assumptions on nominal GDP growth are out the window.
And just take a look at what is expected to happen to revenue. Next financial year, general government revenue is expected to come in at 24.2 per cent of GDP. By the end of the forward estimates, revenue will be bringing in 25.9 per cent of GDP.
In historical terms, this would be an extraordinary outcome. In the period since 1996-97, there have been only two years when revenue as a percentage of GDP exceeded 25.9 per cent, in 2000-01 and 2005-06. Now many of us would agree that we live in extraordinary times, just not the sort of extraordinary times that would generate the surge in government revenue assumed in the budget.
And there are a number of breathtaking assumptions. Capital gains tax revenue is expected to go from $13.4bn this year to $17.5bn in 2019-20. And superannuation taxes will rise from $6.6bn this year to $10.9bn at the end of the forward estimates, an increase of 65 per cent.
Even taking into account the changes to the taxation of superannuation contained in the budget — a series of measures that will no doubt induce anger among the Coalition’s base and negate the Treasurer’s pledge to spare current retirees — the increase in superannuation taxes looks implausible. There is a long history of appalling forecasting of superannuation taxation receipts on the part of Treasury.
Stopping a couple of thousand loaded guns getting on board aircraft is not mere "security theatre".Anyone annoyed at long airport security lines and
picayune-seeming inspectors should be grateful that watchful agents of
the Transportation Security Administration have been confiscating guns
at an unfortunately record pace from travelers who mindlessly pack them
in their carry-on bags.This is plainly illegal, but last year, 2,653 firearms —
83 percent of them loaded! — were seized from carry-on luggage, up 441
guns from the previous record haul in 2014. The pace keeps rising. In
the week of April 18, airport agents detected and seized 73 guns from
carry-ons, the most ever in a week. Sixty-eight of them were loaded and
27 had a round chambered and ready to be triggered. That violates the
most basic safety precautions that the gun lobby insists most
law-abiding, gun-carrying citizens carefully observe in indulging their
Second amendment rights in public.
Observational evidence for the existence of Dark Matter is limited to its gravitational effects. The extensive program for dedicated searches has yielded null results so far, challenging the most popular models. Here we propose that this is the case because the very existence of cold Dark Matter is a manifestation of gravity itself. The consistent bimetric theory of gravity, the only known ghost-free extension of General Relativity involving a massless and a massive spin-2 field, automatically contains a perfect Dark Matter candidate. We demonstrate that the massive spin-2 particle can be heavy, stable on cosmological scales, and that it interacts with matter only through a gravitational type of coupling. Remarkably, these features persist in the same region of parameter space where bimetric theory satisfies the current gravity tests. We show that the observed Dark Matter abundance can be generated via freeze-in and suggest possible particle physics and gravitational signatures of our bimetric Dark Matter model.You heard it here first. Probably.
Global warming is almost totally out of the news since the evidence that is happening has all but disappeared.This is by way of introduction to a video by retired climate scientist Lindzen, which had already been thoroughly debunked (at length) by Barry Bickmore.
The Case for the 1-Minute Workout Is Getting Stronger | TIME: In the latest study, published in PLOS One, exercise scientists led by Martin Gibala, chair of kinesiology at McMaster University, who has spent the last several years documenting the health benefits of interval training, found that as little as one minute of intensive exercise could have the same health benefits for the heart, respiratory fitness and muscles as 45 minutes of more typical continuous exercise over three months.
Granted, those 60 seconds have to be at a sprint-like pace, as if you’re being chased down by a tiger and fueled by adrenaline. But it’s just 60 seconds. “I think there is good evidence that shows you can see comparable benefits despite the fact that intervals require less total exercise and reduced time commitment,” says Gibala.
Stiglitz: The prevalent ideology—when I say prevalent it’s not all economists— held that markets were basically efficient, that they were stable. You had people like Greenspan and Bernanke saying things like “markets don't generate bubbles.” They had precise models that were precisely wrong and gave them confidence in theories that led to the policies that were responsible for the crisis, and responsible for the growth in inequality. Alternative theories would have led to very different policies. For instance, the tax cut in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush. Economists that are very widely respected were cutting taxes at the top, increasing inequality in our society when what we needed was just the opposite. Most of the models used by economists ignored inequality. They pretended that macroeconomy was unaffected by inequality. I think that was totally wrong. The strange thing about the economics profession over the last 35 year is that there has been two strands: One very strongly focusing on the limitations of the market, and then another saying how wonderful markets were. Unfortunately too much attention was being paid to that second strand.
What can we do about it? We've had this very strong strand that is focused on the limitations and market imperfections. A very large fraction of the younger people, this is what they want to work on. It's very hard to persuade a young person who has seen the Great Recession, who has seen all the problems with inequality, to tell them inequality is not important and that markets are always efficient. They'd think you're crazy.
This DNA analysis made it possible to examine which factors impact the diversity of the microbiome (the intestinal bacterial community unique to each of us). And that appears to be many. Wijmenga says, "You see, for example, the effect of diet in the gut." People who regularly
consume yogurt or buttermilk have a greater diversity of gut bacteria. Coffee and wine can increase the diversity as well, while whole milk or a high-calorie diet can decrease it.
"In total we found 60 dietary factors that influence the diversity. What these mean exactly is still hard to say," explains UMCG researcher Alexandra Zhernakova, the first author of the Science article. "But there is a good correlation between diversity and health: greater diversity is better."