What I’m trying to do is look at the Income Tax brackets over time to compare the ways different Administrations dealt with the issue of financing our government. I’m just getting started, but I’m already awed at the variability in the Income Tax rates over time. These first graphs are adapted from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com […]
I guess I’ve heard the Republican Talking Point that the Democrats were "tax and spend" so long myself that I questioned the results in my last post. So I did it again from scratch. The graph in the upper left is the raw data for income and expenses. The one in the upper right is […]
All values expressed as a % of the same year GDP "The Democrats want high taxes and are big spenders!" We hear it day after day. This is more data from the government web sites, The top graph is the US Income. Notice that Reagan/Bush Tax Cuts didn’t make much difference, though George W.’s did. […]
I’ve gotten a couple of comments about my obsession with graphs ["They’re too hard to figure out."]. So I’m going to narrate this one, because it’s important as it sits in opposition to the biggest Republican lie of all. The data comes from the Treasury Department and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. line 2 and […]
The One Percent Economy–Part One: The What Open Left by: Paul Rosenberg September 26, 2009 There are lots of different ways to slice up the economy to analyze it. But if you slice it fine enough to separate out the top 1% – and subdivisions with it, a funny thing happens: you discover that the […]
John Steinbeck’s last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, was a painful piece of his literary legacy for me. While he had long documented the travails of the downtrodden and marginalized characters among us, he was a master of never losing sight of their humanity or their humor. But in this last novel, he tells […]
I periodically have graphing attacks. I know they’re boring, but it’s just a way some of us think. The topic is the economy, and there’s just no way to talk about it without graphs. The one on the right is the familiar Dow Jones Industrial Average plotted over the time stored in the CNN Data […]
As a non-FOX watcher, I guess I’d assumed that Glenn Beck was like their other guys – Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove – generating negative Taliking Points hourly against whatever any Democrat or non-conservative said about anything. But that’s not right. The other day, I saw his Rockerfeller Center Art piece which he interpreted […]
The Rights of Corporations New York Times editorial September 21, 2009 The question at the heart of one of the biggest Supreme Court cases this year is simple: What constitutional rights should corporations have? To us, as well as many legal scholars, former justices and, indeed, drafters of the Constitution, the answer is that their […]