I frequently use PolitiFact.com as one of two main resources for checking out the reliability of political statements and web rumors (the other resource being Snopes.com, of course). I subscribe to PolitiFact’s RSS feed. That’s how we happen to be staring at the apparently preposterous proposition that the US taxpayer should get stuck with 100% of the IRS tax bill.

This particular controversy is about the Pennsylvania race the for U.S. Senate, with Republican Pat Toomey and Democrat Joe Sestak trading potshots in the manner to which we’ve all come to expect of politicians. You can read the entire PolitiFact analysis at this link.

Narrator: “Do you think corporations pay their fair share? Pat Toomey thinks corporations shouldn’t pay any taxes.”

Clip of Toomey: “Lets not tax corporations. … I think the solution is to eliminate corporate taxes altogether.”

PolitiFact digs down into the source of this video sequence. Toomey began by arguing that taxes on corporations end up getting passed on to the consumer, “which ends up hurting economic growth”.

Taxes Affect Prices. I knew the first part. It’s a basic axiom of Econ 101 that taxes (and any other cost of doing business) are, and must be, built into the pricing model. No matter what the tax policy of a particular nation, in the long run the spread between gross profit and net profit must exceed a certain minimum margin, or it’s curtains for the corporation, shareholders and any consumer depending on that product or service.

Costs of Economic Growth. The second part is partly true and partly pure twaddle. Toomey argues that reduced corporate taxes would make the U.S. more competitive in global markets. We only have to look at Chinese competitive strategy, and the sheer size of U.S. trade imports, to realize this part of Toomey’s argument is true. For 2009 the trade deficit with China alone was 20 billion dollars (US Census data). Remember,  this represents the extent to which U.S. corporations buy from China to avoid buying from each other.

Toomey appears to realize that a zero corporate tax obligation is not politically or economically feasible, but would settle for a tax reduction: “I’d prefer none on corporations, but much lower would be better.”

Twaddle: Whether lower corporate tax or zero, Toomey’s argument assumes that most or all of the savings in the costs of doing business would end up being passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices, while simultaneously increasing U.S. sales volumes.

• It’s folly to suppose that Congress could agree to pay for reduced corporate taxes by coordinated reductions in U.S. spending, so the slack would be picked up by reductions in services (which would have to be paid for some other way), and by increases in the individual income tax rate.
• Therefore a cut in the corporate tax rate could further erode U.S. consumer purchasing power, causing an even greater weakening of the U.S. economy.
• “Demand pull” does not necessarily reduce prices even if we can afford to buy more. Contrary to classic free-market theory, prices are elastic upward, not downward. In the last 52 weeks, oil has gone from $92.75 to $74 a barrel (20% reduction) but gasoline in my area has fallen from about $3.59 a gallon to $3.16 (12% reduction).

Conclusions:

• Conservative free-market rhetoric is jingoistic and poorly thought out.
• A sea change in U.S. economic direction requires broad-based popular support and understanding. It has to be underwritten by the taxpayer. No one political party or ideology will ever be able to accomplish this on its own.
• Toomey’s plan is also poorly thought out. Its arguments would make just as much sense if the proposition were to eliminate individual income taxes and let corporations pick up 100% of the tab.
• The U.S. trade deficit and global competitive position are serious long-range issues and must be dealt with.
• Unfair trade-off: Toomey’s plan probably would increase U.S. competitiveness in global markets, while adversely affecting domestic consumption.

The quaint notion that there’s some equitable mix of corporate and individual taxes is a dangerous misunderstanding. Toomey’s arguments rest on the assumption that the two main sources of tax revenue are economically intertwined.

So it is strange, to say the least, that he would favor a reduction in one of the components with no mention of its impact on the other.

If it’s a stealth spending reduction Toomey is really favoring, elimination of the three trillion dollar war ($500,000 a minute) would go a long way in the right direction.  Toomey is a libertarian-leaning conservative with a disregard for civil rights (go figure) whose voting record supported the Iraq war.

Toomey isn’t challenging the U.S. tax structure; he’s only whining about who should shoulder the burden, which is still to say, he doesn’t think our pals in corporate America should shoulder any of it … in an idealized Big Rock Candy Mountain conservative world of the future.

VAT

If we want to open the Pandora’s Box issue of who should pay taxes, let’s expand the discussion to include looking at the European-style VAT (value-added tax). Everybody pays it (directly or indirectly), nobody gets to weasel out, and we could dump the universally despised federal income tax entirely.

Remember “1984″? It’s banned in some American schools. In fact, a partial listing includes most of my required reading for our high school classes in the early 1960′s.

I’d heard about Harry Potter being banned by some religious groups for being too irreligious. You can see more complete lists on the web. Just do a Google search on “Banned Books Week“. If this is “to much information”, try the easy-to-scroll list at the Wikipedia link. It’s a real eye-opener.

I found out about the scope of this problem  from an AARP bulletin. The American Library Association has proclaimed September 25 – October 2 “Banned Books Week”.

Below is a partial list of banned books that I’ve read at some point in my life. Can you spot any patterns?

How many have you read? Honor Banned Book Week by reading a title you’ve not read before. Heck, I might even try Harry Potter. If it was burned in New Mexico, maybe it’ll be my cup of tea after all.

BANNED

• 1984, Orwell
• A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway
• The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck
• Animal Farm, Orwell
• Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut
• The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway
• I know Why the Caged Bird sings, Maya Angelou
• Jaws, Benchley
• On The Origin of the Species, Darwin
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien
• For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
• The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis
• The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain
• Brave New World, Huxley
• Of Mice and Men, Steinbeck
• Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
• The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
• Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury
• Catch-22, Heller

I would violate my own terms of service (TOS) if I posted this in Computers because it hijacks a thread that, by rights, should have been about digital audio. Also, my letter cites the same cuss word I’m writing Stereophile about (another TOS violation). So, the questionable word is expertly edited out so that you could hardly recognize it.

I’ll let you know if the magazine publishes the letter, if they see fit to do so, if I remember that I promised to do so.

Sent: Fri 2/12/2010 4:09 PM
To: ‘STletters@SourceInterlink.com’

I picked up on the current “pieces of s***” thread in Letters; I must have been particularly rabbit-brained that day to miss Art Dudley’s introductory vituperation. I always read Art, or thought I did. While I shilly-shallied for over a year over whether or not I needed a DAT, as soon as Art wrote about the $99 Music Streamer, I became an entry-level DAT fan and never looked back.

So, here I was prepared to write a rejoinder that I found his “piece of s***” remark offensive, not because I don’t luxuriate in stronger language in private, nor to excoriate, berate or condemn, but just to echo the observation that political invective, however beloved, doesn’t really have a proper place in an audiophile magazine. Jayne Wilson of Liverpool so eloquently covered this sensibility in her letter.

Henceforth, let it be known to all ye privy to this thread, that we may recognize a subtext meaning to the code phrase “pieces of eight” — if adopted: “Their real worth was assessed at several pieces of eight.”

I was also working myself up to say that, even if I agreed with the comment, it honestly didn’t belong in the magazine. Then, alerted to Art’s thoughtful reply in the March issue, I discovered that I did agree with Art’s unguarded evaluation of the political luminaries in question. Horrors! Should that make any difference?

No, I still think we should relegate political diatribe and hyperbole to AOL chat rooms, back room blogs and the raw guano splattered on the bottom rungs of the unfortunate MarketWatch site. As much as I enjoy dissing sinister cabals in private conversation, that pastime should have no real place of honor in Stereophile. Nonetheless, hats off to Art, thanks for getting me to buy the $99 DAT, and should one expect to be 3x happier with the $299 DAT, and so on and so forth, all the way up the price tag scale?

Alex Forbes
Castro Valley, CA

Read the article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8509455.stm

Excerpt:

A Turkish court has sentenced the editor of a Kurdish newspaper to 21 years in prison for publishing material sympathetic to the outlawed PKK …

The paper had in fact simply described the jailed leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, as the “leader of the Kurdish people” – and it had failed to describe Turkish soldiers killed in battle as “martyrs”.

Excerpt:

AMAZON SHARES FALL ON REPORTS OF E-BOOK PRICE DISPUTE

By Dan Gallagher

3:26 PM ET Feb 1, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Shares of Amazon.com sold off Monday on news that the company has pulled several titles of a major book publisher in a dispute about prices for its Kindle e-book reader.

Reports over the weekend in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal said the company has removed several titles from Macmillan, one of the largest book publishers in the U.S., which had been demanding that Amazon raise the prices on its e-book titles above the $9.99 cap that has been the norm for Kindle titles on the site.

(Read the full article at MarketWatch)

This hit the news yesterday. A small and very devout Michigan firm makes the gunsights, which include some of the finest military rifle scopes in the world.

And that’s the problem. These scopes are doing heavy service in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. They are being furnished to the Iraqi police force. To a culture still resentful of the Christian European Crusades back in the middle ages, the image of returning Crusaders is inescapable.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, US troops overseas are uncomfortable with the prospect of capture while in possession of one of those infidel rifle scopes. Christian organizations and politicians everywhere now express concern.

This wouldn’t raise so much as an eyebrow if it were Koran inscriptions on Taliban AK-47′s, or Torah references on Israeli Uzis, but a cowed world hushes as we await the inevitable reaction of the mullahs.

BBC, reporting on remarks made by General David Petraeus: the practice of scripture references was “disturbing” and “a serious concern”.

My question is: how could the Pentagon not know?

If you were looking through a gunsight and scope catalog and happened to notice a model number “2COR4:6″ or “JN8:12″, chances are you probably wouldn’t think anything of it, though the colon might strike one as a bit odd.

But, if you look through such catalogs for a living, as do military armament procurers at places like Aberdeen Proving Ground, it wouldn’t take long before someone made the connection.

If you Google “2COR4:6″, most of the hits on the first page are biblical websites. Just as the Dewey Decimal System and ISBN numbers are standard in libraries everywhere, 2COR4:6 is the nomenclature universally used by the Biblical cataloging and reference system.

I don’t go to chapel as regularly as those military chaps, but even I would have figured it out eventually.

Everybody obviously figured it would be OK as long as it remained the secret of the chosen few. I think it would be easy to make too much out of it, or “get your panties in a bunch” as the Brits say. If I regularly attended a mosque or synagogue, I don’t think I’d find the underlying arrogance and presumptuousness of key-coded Christian military armament engravings so funny.

Having said all that, it was still incredibly stupid to let this slide all the way through the arduous evaluation and selection process of military review and procurement. At least we found it before the Islamic scholars did.

Links

BBC: US firm to remove Biblical references on gunsights
TPM: U.S. Rifle Scopes In Iraq And Afghanistan Feature Bible Verse Citations

The online article is by writer Tom Doggett. Excerpt:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Wind energy could generate 20 percent of the electricity needed by households and businesses in the eastern half of the United States by 2024, but it would require up to $90 billion in investment, according to a government report released on Wednesday.

Why only 20%? How much electrical energy do we use, anyway? Is $90 billion really such a big investment for this kind of payoff?

Getting relevant online national statistics was not as easy as it sounds. Regional breakdowns were not helpful – what, exactly, does “eastern half” of the US mean? Most publications focus on the consumer: household electrical consumption (but not government and industrial), and ways to save energy. Building an energy cost picture from the bottom up was not the way to go. I found a very useful table from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: Consumption, Price, and Expenditure Estimates.

I wanted the entire annual electrical consumption for the United States. That turned out to be the grand total in the lower right corner of the EIA table. Other reading suggested consumption has flattened, though ours by any standard is still by far the highest consumption by country or per capita in the world. So the 2007 figure is still in the ballpark.

Given the exactitude of phrases like “eastern half of the United States”, I had to make assumptions. I wanted a ballpark dollars figure for consumption, and if I was going to err I wanted to lowball it. Here’s what I came up with, and posted to the Sciam website as a reply to the article:

What is the current electrical consumption of this eastern “region”? Doing some Google-and-napkin calculations, in 2007 the US consumed 40,558 trillion BTU’s of electrical power. That’s about 11.9 trillion kWH. If the average cost is $0.12/kWH, the nation spent a surprising $1.43 trillion on electricity purchases in 2007. If the “eastern half” is only the Northeast and South Atlantic states, and that’s only 25% of the annual US expenditure, $357 billion doesn’t make a $90 billion regional expenditure sound so bad if amortized over even a decade.

I came across the excerpt below in the 11/6/2009 RSS blog feed of Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editorial writer for New Yorker magazine:

On MSNBC’s “Ed Show” just now, substitute host David Shuster’s guests were Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, the founder of Daily Kos, and Tom Tancredo, the former Colorado congressman and 2008 Republican Presidential hopeful.
After Tancredo expressed his view that the Veterans Health Administration should be abolished and replaced by giving veterans vouchers with which to buy private health insurance on the free market, Kos pointed out that he, Kos, is an actual veteran (he did a three-year hitch in the Army), as opposed to someone who, after supporting the Vietnam War as a college Republican, avoided the draft by parlaying the fact that he had been treated for depression into a 1-Y deferment. Kos didn’t mention Tancredo by name, but Tancredo knew whom Kos was talking about. Tancredo, muttering “cheap shot” and “insult,” removed his earpiece and lapel mic and got up to leave the set.
Was it a cheap shot? Yes, but I for one am glad that Kos took it. There are few forms of life lower than chest-thumping, warmongering, manlier-than-thou draft dodgers (although conservatives who denounce “government health care” on the grounds that it might lead to cuts in Medicare run them a close second), and it is always satisfying when someone calls one of them out.

You can currently read the Hertzberg post and watch a video at this link.

Now perhaps you can see why I ask: who is an “actual” veteran?

I enlisted in the US Army and completed a three year tour of duty, so that makes me a veteran. I served a year in Vietnam, so that makes me a Vietnam vet. And that’s all. I’m just another citizen with an opinion.

My opinion is that those who never served in the military, those who sat out the Vietnam war in Canada, single-enlistment and career military, Doves, Hawks and the undecided all have exactly one vote and one opinion. The notion that your opinion is disqualifying because you didn’t serve in the right war in the right service branch at the right time is un-American rubbish. That notion has no place in political discourse.

This uber-citizen myth came to a head in the 2004 election campaign with the so-called “swift Boat” people (and a lot of others who never stepped foot on a boat). You’ll recall their argument was that Sen. Kerry wasn’t qualified to be President of the United States because he wasn’t as much of a war hero as Swift Boaters … nearly transparent rhetoric, but effective.

The notion that the military and ex-military know better than the rest of a country what’s good for the national interest is hardly confined to the United States. Former regimes in Argentina, Chile, North Korea and WWII-Germany come to mind. The fallacy is that my experience in Vietnam, or yours in the hellholes in Iraq or Afghanistan, somehow preempt ordinary political discourse or even national foreign policy. Not true.

It seems to me that the clout of belonging to a million-plus voting bloc has just gone to some folks’ heads. With all due respect to all of us who have served overseas, we know perfectly well that (1) they didn’t tell us squat when we were over there, and (2) most of us didn’t understand or really give a rat about foreign policy.

Some veterans and some uniformed career military are fully informed on politics and foreign policy and, commendably, those men and women do take those issues passionately. This in no way affects their “one-man-one-vote” status.

The issue of adequate military support, if indeed we’re going to send Americans overseas to “limited wars” at all, is quite serious. Neither does this fact confer any special political status upon active-duty service people, or ex-military civilians.

In the Hertzberg citations above, we can see the “cheap shot” taken against one of the debaters as an effort to disqualify the opponent without actually addressing the argument. This is the time-honored argument ad hominem, in which by smearing the opponent one neatly sidesteps the issue itself.

There probably will always be those who might say that because I never “actually” got shot at in Vietnam, I’m not qualified to write this post. The whole idea of this post is to remind us all that a return to civilian life means exactly that. The kind of political smear popular in the 2004 campaign is unwarranted. It’s unworthy of anyone who respects the values of American democracy.

And what, exactly, was it about those “chest-thumping, warmongering, manlier-than-thou draft dodgers”? Without reviving the divisive 40-year ugliness of national and family polarization over Vietnam, the choice between Canada – and death in an unpopular, unwinnable war of attrition – isn’t that hard to figure out. I never felt antipathy to the Canada option. For those who objected to mindless war and pointless sacrifice of the nation’s youth, it seemed more proactive to be willing to take the consequences of waiting out the war in Canada than being sent off like lemmings to Nixon and Johnson’s fatally flawed and cynical War.

Hertzberg’s opening editorials in The New Yorker usually strike me as paragons of erudition, reason and balanced opinion. The blog shows a different side of many writers. That “draft dodger” crack sounded like a cheap shot all of its own.

From the Wikipedia article on Heuristics:

Heuristic … (from the Greek … for “find” or “discover”) is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is particularly used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or ‘optimal solution’. Heuristics are “rules of thumb”, educated guesses, intuitive judgments or simply common sense. A Heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.

From an email today: Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on items you purchased or told us you own.

Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on items you purchased or told us you own.

If you match this up to my interests as expressed in departments on this website, it would seem Amazon’s batting average is getting more sophisticated in computerized matching  to my purchasing habits. If this same email had come from Wal-Mart based on my Amazon purchasing habits, I’d be writing my congressional representatives. As an Amazon customer I’ve seen for years how they match their recommendations to items I’ve ordered, from mystery novels to wristwatches. I have never seen any evidence of Amazon selling my purchasing information.

Let’s see how well Amazon scores against what I know of my interests and purchases.

Here’s my analysis of how Amazon’s recommended items ended up on my email:

1. The Help. I never heard of this book title or author. Publisher Penguin could be a match on almost anything.  But it’s a match: customers who bought this item also bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage) by Stieg Larsson, which I bought and liked so much I ordered another one in the series. Score: 1
2. Orion Moon Filter. I have never ordered telescope equipment from Amazon, but I did order several books on Astronomy several years ago. Score: 1
3. Floodplain: CD by Kronos Quartet, who published a CD of string quartets by Philip Glass which I ordered quite some time ago. Score: 1
4. Requiem, CD by John Taverner: I have never ordered this composer, but it is still a match to the Philip Glass CD order because several items were recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic in both cases! Score: 1
5. The Moment’s Energy: I have never heard of CD artist Evan Parker, and to be honest I can’t see the reason for this match. Score: 0
6. The Landmark Xenophon’s Hellenika: matches The Landmark Herodotus, ordered a couple of years back.  Score: 1
7. The Ivory Grin: matches Steig Larsson publisher Black Lizard.
8. Lost On The Way: contemporary Jazz CD, artist Louis Sclavis unknown to me. Unsure what they’re matching on, probably “Jazz”. Kinda pretty tracks, a bit too new age for me. Score 0.5

This gives Amazon a score of 6.5 out of 8 (81%, a solid “B”). But alas, these heuristical guesses rarely result in extra purchase revenues for Amazon. I decide what book or CD I want to order based on what I’m already interested in at the moment, and that’s hard to anticipate in a computer program.

An ad by any other name is still an ad. But it’s fun to look at or listen to the recommendations, and once in a while it actually does drum up new business. That would probably only work when I’ve made a decision to accumulate more of a certain favorite author, recording artist or genre.