Mon, 29 Oct 2007

Random references for issue 28

• "Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not" by Steven D. Levitt (2004)
• "All Choices Created Equal? How Good Parents Select `Failing' Schools", by Courtney Bell, National Center for the Study of Privatization of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University working paper, 2005.

14:40 - 29 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Wed, 24 Oct 2007

New Hampshire taxes

For readers coming here from the column in today's newspaper: Scroll down a bit.

09:49 - 24 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Their own enemies

This publication is on several press lists, and so I receive press releases from a variety of publications looking for ink. I've been getting releases from the URI College Republicans for a little while, with some irregularities in the address that let me know that they probably got the press list from someone at the statehouse. Imagine my surprise when I got the following message, with the same irregularities.

Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:45:27 -0400
From: "Protest College Republicans"
To: protesturicollegegop@gmail.com
Subject: URI COLLEGE REPUBLICANS PROTEST

Hello,

The same URI College Republicans who brought you a White, Heterosexual Male Scholarship are now bringing you an Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. The racism, sexism and bigotry continues.

The URI College Republicans must be stopped!

Join myself and dozens of other students as we protest the URI College Republicans tomorrow night at 7PM when they host Robert Spencer, a Muslim-Hating, Bush propogandist in the Memorial Union Ballroom.

Let's put an end to this racism, sexism and bigotry!

This man wrote "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam". What a sicko!

Protest Details:
What: Robert Spencer Speech
Where: Memorial Union Ballroom
When: Wednesday Oct 24 @ 7 PM

Since this clearly came from the URI College Republicans, I'd assume that anyone who showed up to protest was a willing tool of that organization. Wouldn't you?

09:49 - 24 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Tue, 23 Oct 2007

RIPR 28 Coming soon...

• Corrections budget -- Our curious priorities: Locking up criminals but slighting the police who are supposed to catch them.
• Book review -- Against Prediction Police and parole officials try to predict who will commit crimes, but is that a good way to reduce crime?
• Trying to predict the cost of our flat tax cap for the rich. The IRS withholds data.

Didn't you mean to subscribe?

07:35 - 23 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Our flinty neighbors to the north

Answering questions about New Hampshire's taxes. A table of NH property tax rates. You can see in it that the vacation towns tend to have much lower rates than the less fashionable towns. The cities tend to be on the low end of the high side. But check for yourself.

A table of RI property tax rates. Here, too, is it any accident that the lowest rates are in places like Block Island and Little Compton?

New Hampshire's property taxes, in aggregate, aren't that much different from Rhode Island's. But when you look at the non-vacation areas of that state, they're substantially higher. So New Hampshire is allowing its out-of-state owners to subsidize a slightly lower property tax, which is fine for them, but where does that leave a state whose leaders say we should emulate them?

07:28 - 23 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Thu, 18 Oct 2007

Trickle-down works after all

Read here.

14:41 - 18 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

How much is the "flat" tax costing us?

As you may know, in 2006, the legislature adopted a tax cap for very wealthy taxpayers. The idea is that we shouldn't tax those people any more than they'd be taxed in Massachusetts. This is supposed to help our economy somehow, though there is little reason to think so, unless you think that rich investors power the economy, regardless of the fate of the workers, customers, inventors, roads, schools, police and fire departments on which they depend.

But putting those little details aside, there is some confusion about how much this tax cut will actually cost us. The tax division put some numbers out in 2006, based on the 2005 tax returns, but they didn't make any predictions for the future. What's been clear over the past several years is that the incomes of the wealthy are growing at a different rate than the incomes of the less-wealthy. This makes tax projections tricky.

What makes them trickier is that the Bush administration's IRS has decided it's no longer important to provide detailed tax data for the states. (They still provide state data, but with far less detail than since the statistics of income bureau was established.) So there are some significant grains of salt to take with tax projections. That said, knowing the cost of this cut is important to what passes for policy debate around here, so I spent some time this past week reconstructing my model of income distribution and tax collections for our state, to take newer data into account.

Here is what I get for the flat tax costs. The second column is the limit, which is applied to the taxpayer's taxable income:

Caveats: I'd be willing to bet these are within 10% of the right answer, but no better than that. These are tax year predictions, not fiscal years. Here's the hit on fiscal years, more useful for discussions of the state budget:

These are the best estimates I can make with the available data. When more data becomes available, I will revise them.

08:12 - 18 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Sun, 14 Oct 2007

Where it all goes

A cool way to look at the federal government's budget.

21:53 - 14 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Fri, 12 Oct 2007

Income inequality up

Apparently as high as its been in the US since statistics have been kept. This article in the radical rag The Wall Street Journal reports that researchers say you probably have to go back to the 1920's to find a comparable period.

15:03 - 12 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Wed, 10 Oct 2007

Can you trust reporters to report?

Especially when they quote people. Read about Hillary and torture.

22:13 - 10 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

Mon, 01 Oct 2007

Iran?

Read here.

12:00 - 01 Oct 2007 [/y7/oc] link

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