"In short, we have tested starve-the-beast theory in the laboratory, and it has failed miserably. "
a raft of eminently sensible reforms to copyright law, including expanding and clarifying fair use; reaffirming that copyright's purpose is to serve the public interest (not to enrich investors); to limit statutory damages for copyright infringement; to punish false copyright claims; and to limit copyright terms.From the second link, the Republican retraction included...
Copyright reform would have far-reaching impacts, so it is incredibly important that it be approached with all facts and viewpoints in hand.I think that Republican statement means "our previous document failed to include the feelings of the people who are currently making obscene profits under our current law".
"Except that if we look at the composition of the 2010 Congress, for instance, we find that it was 57% Protestant and 29% Catholic and 7% Jewish. The general population is 51% Protestant and 24% Catholic, so that these two branches of Christianity are actually over-represented in the political class. And, Episcopalians and Presbyterians, the members of the old WASP denominations, are over-represented among the Protestants. Only 43 members of that Congress were African-American, i.e. less than 10% and less than their proportion in the general population. 28 members were Latinos. Women held 90 seats, or about 17% and were obviously grossly under-represented in favor of men."
"I'm sure there is a lot of soul-searching and rending of garments in Republican circles this morning, asking "how could this have happened?" Obviously, there are a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they have been acting like barbarians for the past four years and all the non-tea drinking normal people finally put their collective foot down. Being the party of racists, sexists and greedy plutocrats in a country with a non-white, female, middle and working class majority may not be the smartest electoral strategy."
A sincere question. Take Sheldon Adelson, for instance. Suppose the math is true, and Romney loses. Adelson spent x trying to install politicians who would save him tax money. Let y = the money he would have spent if he'd just shut up and paid the tax bill Obama actually proposed. I don't imagine this is an easy question to answer once you get into the weeds of it, but I'd offer the hypothesis that in the end, it's very possible that the absurdly wealthy are paying more for pointless advocacy than they would ever pay under an historically moderate tax regime.
Come to think of it, a lot of the odder critiques of Silver have been coming out of Politico. But that makes a kind of sense. Silver’s work poses a threat to more traditional — and, in particular, to more excitable — forms of political punditry and horse-race journalism.
If you had to distill the work of a political pundit down to a single question, you’d have to pick the perennial “who will win the election?” During election years, that’s the question at the base of most careers in punditry, almost all cable news appearances, and most A1 news articles. Traditionally, we’ve answered that question by drawing on some combination of experience, intuition, reporting and polls. Now Silver — and Silver’s imitators and political scientists — are taking that question away from us. It would be shocking if the profession didn’t try and defend itself.
More recently, we in the media — and particularly we in the media at Politico — have tried to grab an edge in the race for Web traffic by hyping our election stories far beyond their actual importance. The latest gaffe is always a possible turning point, the momentum is always swinging wildly, the race is endlessly up in the air. It thus presents a bit of a problem for us if our readers then turn to sites like Silver’s and find that none of this actually appears to be true and a clear-eyed look at the data shows a fairly stable race over long periods of time.
"The top income tax rates have changed considerably since the end of World War II. Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The average tax rate faced by the top 0.01% of taxpayers was above 40% until the mid-1980s; today it is below 25%. Tax rates affecting taxpayers at the top of the income distribution are currently at their lowest levels since the end of the second World War.
The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate
and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.
However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income
accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities."
"However, Romney, nebulous assurances notwithstanding, has proposed cuts in FEMA of approximately 40%."
