Britain decided to increase income tax on the top one percent of taxpayers to fifty percent. Predictably, revenues from the top one percent of tax payers collapsed. This demonstrates the entirely unsurprising fact that a income tax of 50% plus VAT tax of 20% for an effective tax of 60%, is well above the Laffer limit. I doubt that this came as any surprise to those imposing the tax. More …
Reproduction
Pretty soon, just as heterosexuals who are having fun are no longer “gayâ€, heterosexuals who have committed to permanently be together will no longer be “marriedâ€.
Michelle Fields interviews the astroturf
The supposedly 99% attempted to occupy the supposedly 1%, the CPAC conference. But it seems the 99% were a bit hard up for warm bodies.
Murray refuted
I found Murray’s major theses in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, hard to believe, in particular, that the elite is sexually well behaved.
The virtuous upper class?
According to Charles Murray in the top 20 percent of citizens in income and education exemplify the core founding of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religious observance. They raise their children in stable homes. This is not my observation. My observation is that the the higher the socioeconomic status of the male, the better his behavior, but the higher the socioeconomic status of the female, the worse her behavior.
Inflation
Total sales are rising ten percent a year in nominal terms.   Surprise surprise, shadowstats estimates ten percent inflation per year if we use the measure of inflation that was used in the the 1980s.   Hawaiian Libertarian reports that that is pretty much what he is seeing when he puts his money down. So what is the true rate of inflation? There is no one true rate of inflation, since to …
Steyn nails it:
Our Sick State: I don’t quite know what you’d call these rituals, but the term “private health-care system” doesn’t seem the most obvious fit. Indeed, as in so many other areas of American life — the Fannie-Freddied mortgage market, the six-figure college education — the main purpose of these dysfunctional labyrinths ever more disconnected from any genuinely free market seems to be to discredit the very concept of a “private” …
Manufactured spectacle at Oakland
The police toss smoke grenades, not tear gas grenades, a short distance upwind, between themselves and the protestors. This is not riot control, it is a manufactured photo opportunity Observe the hand motion. He is tossing a smoke grenade just in front, not at the protestors. If you are wondering how heavily outnumbered protestors accomplished their goal of occupying the city hall, despite announcing it at least a day in …
Why Bernanke is not panicking
The stimulus is finally taking effect. As Zimbabwe and the Wiemar Republic demonstrate, one thing that governments armed with the ability to print fiat money really can do is stimulate. From 2009 May to 2011 November total business sales in dollars rose twenty six percent, ten percent a year, which to me, though not to Bernanke, looks like good reason to scream panic and hit the brakes, to raise real …
Ben Bernanke pledges to throw gasoline on the fire
Bernanke pledges to keep interest rates low for at least the next two years – meaning real interest are several percent negative. Large negative interest rates rapidly lead to economic crisis. “The low level of inflation is a validation,†Bernanke said. “There are some who were very concerned that our balance-sheet policies and the like would lead to high inflation. There’s certainly no sign of that yet.†Really? Sales have gone …