Let’s Get Our Stuff Back Open Left by: Chris Bowers Oct 07, 2009 … The best bet is for Progressives to target the budget next year. Specifically, they should demand a substantial, probably 10%, increase in taxes on the wealthiest 1% of Americans. Here is why: Increasing taxes on the rich is pretty popular. In […]
Iran: More accomplished in one day of negotiations than in 8 years of threats Salon by Glenn Greenwald Oct. 2, 2009 Here are two stories from the last 24 hours which provide an interesting and glaring contrast: McClatchy, reporting on yesterday’s meeting with Iran in Geneva: Iran also pledged that within weeks it would allow […]
… U.S. rises to most admired country in the world. ThinkProgress 10/08/2009 Reuters reports that a new global survey has found that the United States is the most admired country in the world. The U.S. nabbed the top spot of this year’s National Brand Index (NBI), which ranks countries by how admired they are globally, […]
Government Admits Guantánamo Detainee Mohammed al Qahtani’s Torture Videotaped The Center for Constitutional Rights October 5, 2009 The Center for Constitutional Rights learned today of the existence of video and audio tapes of the abusive interrogations of client Mohammed al Qahtani, the victim of the “First Special Interrogation Plan” personally overseen by former Secretary of […]
At the end of my great graphing frenzy, I had a lot more generated along the way that I didn’t post. Maybe I’ll post them as an aside for a reference later. Some of them are pretty interesting. But there were two that I thought I’d put up as a closing parenthesis. Notice that Reagan […]
"You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older, and deeper in debt." I’m aware that one might accuse me of being always on the lookout for some numbers to graph, and that might even be right. But the table of income tax brackets over the years that I’ve been looking at […]
Reagan came along at a time when I was otherwise engaged, so his tenure passed without much awareness on my part. That’s one version of the story. The other is that I just couldn’t stand to listen to the guy. If he came on television, I found myself leaving the room. My response to him […]
I started all this number crunching to look at the reality of the Republican Talking Point that the Democrats are a "tax and spend" political party. It is only a Talking Point, unless you’re filthy rich. FDR’s graduated Tax Schedule did sock it to the rich, but the person who revised it was Johnson, not […]
Total Government Spending [1940-2007] In the last several posts, I’ve been exploring the Republican Talking Point that Democrats are the "tax and spend" party. In war on Talking Points…, I concluded that the "spend" charge is false. Looking at this graph of total spending plotted as % of the Gross Domestic Product, it’s apparent that […]