But I agree with him.

A friend sent me the thought experiment below in an email.

I will say this about it. Although I think the core idea or argument is pretty compelling, I don’t agree necessarily with the conclusion. I intend to follow this up with another blog post explaining why I don’t have a problem with progressive taxation and where I think this falls short.

That being said - I think it might generate some interesting discussion so here it is.

——————————————–

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers, he said, ‘ I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. What happens to the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’ They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
;The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $ 14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. ‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’ ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I!’ ‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’ ‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’ The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics, University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible

And I am so excited we’ve just ordered a new retro-encabulator.
Below is a brief description put out by the vendor, Rockwell.

I’ll be playing around with that thing for months as I implement all its features.

Scott

An atheist I can agree with (on one thing)

Hillary’s Whopper

Here’s an excerpt:

The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the additionally lying claim of having “misspoken.”) The first involves what seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and tutor.

HT to my friend Glenn

I wonder how the programmer did THIS.

hmmmm

Something my brother posted at our group blog.

Scott

“This brings us to a different point - the manner in which religious views should inform public debate and guide elected officials. Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr. – indeed, the majority of great reformers in American History – not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes. To say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo Christian Tradition.

“What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God’s will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

This quote (the whole thing) is from the chapter on Faith in The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (PP 218-219).

Scott

WHO IS HE? - Douglas W. Kmiec is Caruso Family Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law, Pepperdine University. He served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel (U.S. Assistant Attorney General) for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Former Dean of the law school at The Catholic University of America, Professor Kmiec was a member of the law faculty for nearly two decades at the University of Notre Dame.

************************

Today I endorse Barack Obama for president of the United States. I believe him to be a person of integrity, intelligence, and genuine good will. I take him at his word that he wants to move the nation beyond its religious and racial divides and that he wants to return the United States to that company of nations committed to human rights. I do not know if his earlier life experience is sufficient for the challenges of the presidency that lie ahead. I doubt we know this about any of the men or women we might select. It likely depends upon the serendipity of the events that cannot be foreseen. I do have confidence that the senator will cast his net widely in search of men and women of diverse, open-minded views and of superior intellectual qualities to assist him in the wide range of responsibilities that he must superintend.

. . . . . .

As a Republican, I strongly wish to preserve traditional marriage not as a suspicion or denigration of my homosexual friends but as recognition of the significance of the procreative family as a building block of society. As a Republican and as a Catholic, I believe life begins at conception, and it is important for every life to be given sustenance and encouragement. As a Republican, I strongly believe that the Supreme Court of the United States must be fully dedicated to the rule of law and to the employ of a consistent method of interpretation that keeps the court within its limited judicial role. As a Republican, I believe problems are best resolved closest to their source and that we should never arrogate to a higher level of government that which can be more effectively and efficiently resolved below. As a Republican and a constitutional lawyer, I believe religious freedom does not mean religious separation or mindless exclusion from the public square.

In various ways, Sen. Barack Obama and I may disagree on aspects of these important fundamentals, but I am convinced, based upon his public pronouncements and his personal writing, that on each of these questions he is not closed to understanding opposing points of view and, as best as it is humanly possible, he will respect and accommodate them.

Read the whole thing

And this gem on DailyKos

The War Journals of Hillary Clinton, Vol. 1

As bullets clawed the air around us and screams echoed down the rubble-strewn tarmac, I felt almost peaceful.

It was a simple mission, they had told me - get in, shake a few hands and mouth a few platitudes, get out. Simple. Yeah.

Things had started going wrong while we were still in the air and only gotten worse from there. So here we were, pinned down, choking on the acrid tang of cordite and the heady scent of human blood. The mission was even simpler now: survive. Whatever the cost, survive.

There was a grunt and a clatter of equipment as Sinbad threw himself down at my side. Sweat glistened on his bare arms, and I could see tendons contracting and relaxing as he squeezed off bursts from his M14. The motion was hypnotic, like a snake about to strike. Perhaps, when all this was over-

No. Concentrate. Focus on the mission. Survive.

A shout from my left drew my head around. Sheryl Crow, guitar still strapped to her back, had taken cover behind a haphazard pile of decaying corpses. Her hair, once lustrous, now lank and greasy, was held back from her eyes by a dirty red headband. Her slim nostrils flared in the dirt-smeared oval of her face, seeking air free of the funeral taint shrouding the airfield. Still, I saw a fierce exultation in her expression that I knew mirrored my own.

Her lithe, nimble fingers stroked the top of an M67 frag grenade, strumming a chord of impending doom. With one quick, economical movement, she plucked the pin free and sent the deadly payload sailing toward the ridge concealing our enemies. My eyes traced the arc, willing it to fly true, to rain death on-

“There!” Sinbad shouted. “The convoy!”

READ THE WHOLE THING - ITS DELICIOUS

UPDATE - Today’s competition was the regional one and below I have marked how they did.
They were competing at the 7th - 8th grade level.
Hint - Every website won!!

Of my kids. No. Not my real kids. Although I am very proud of all five of them because they are, without exception, AWESOME KIDS.

But in this case I am talking about the kids I have been working with at the local middle school wherein I have been volunteering to teach web design for the last few years.

Tomorrow they will be going to their regional technology competition, where the will be competing in web design, robotics, programming, and General Applications. Here are some links. One of the requirements I made for the kids is that the look, feel and formatting for their sites use something called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Thats a lot harder than the older kind of web pages. All of them met my requirement. Plus they wrote the content and used other applications and tools such as The GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash.

Today I did a final review of their work and all I have to say is . . .
WOW!! Check out the links below and tell me they won’t win.

HONORABLE MENTION — FOOD - This is a team site using almost all AJAX. In other words, very sophisticated using the cutting edge technology used by Google, Yahoo and other big web companies to make fast and interactive web pages for building web-based applications. It has a random fact generator (Did You Know?) As well as an quizlet tool. The hard-core technical stuff here was all done by a 14 year old.

HONORABLE MENTION — ALTERNATIVE ENERGY - This is a team site that makes extensive use of another technology called Flash. Its only the most commonly used 3rd party add-on for websites to make them interactive and, well, “flashy”. For example, every time you watch a video on YouTube, you are using Flash. This site also has great content and is Standards Compliant. Impressive!

FIRST PLACE — HUMAN TRAFFICKING - This is a team site. Standards Compliant (Click on the two W3C images at the bottom of the home page).Great use of Flash (The Header. Plus see what happens when you click on the “Where is it Link”). Random Fact box. Great Content. WOW!

FIRST PLACE — DANCE - This is an individual site on Dance. Simple but very nicely done. With good use of CSS.

THIRD PLACE — ANCIENT EGYPT - This is an individual site that makes good use of CSS. and has a nice layout.

I will update this post when we have the results of their competetion.

Scott