“We can’t raise taxes, that will drive away jobs!” Such is the oft-repeated refrain uttered by Republicans at the Capitol. The implication is that it’s a direct correlation: high taxes means fewer jobs. But is that really the case? The statistics seem to say otherwise.
Minnesota’s latest tax incidence study came out this week (and can be found here). I’ve written about it before, and the trends are pretty much the same as previous studies. Two graphs jump out at me. The first is the overall effective tax rate:
It peaked in 1994, and since 2000, has stayed remarkably stable. It’s hard to argue that government is taxing people more and more.
The next is the updated tax incidence graph. As before, the wealthiest people pay a lower rate than the middle class in Minnesota:
Same story as before, really. It also puts Governor Dayton’s income tax proposal in perspective.
PoliticsTax IncidenceMarch 17, 2011
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In a (very popular by search engine standards) previous post, I talked about moving from Norton Ghost to Clonezilla. Part of the move from Ghost to Clonezilla was creating a method of automatically determining the computer model I was imaging, and selecting the right image. This is possible by changing the custom-ocs file, and here are the changes I made to do it.
TechClonezilla, LinuxMarch 07, 2011
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My GnuPG key was set to expire at the end of this year, so I created a new one. The key is located here. In the extremely unlikely event you need to email me something securely, use this!
I’m a big fan of crypto and secure email. Too bad I so rarely have need to use it.
SecurityEncryption, GnuPG, Public-key cryptographyMarch 06, 2011
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There’s a lot of trends in the U.S. that annoy me, mainly having to do with politics, pundits, and the media. The “he said, she said” method of reporting in which ridiculous arguments are put on an equal footing with sane ones, and hence legitimized. The inability or unwillingness to point out when leaders are lying. The overall shallowness of a lot of reporting. The general anti-intellectualism of a growing segment of this country. But few things annoy me more than those pundits who think that politics just has too much of that messy politics in it.
