Comment Elsewhere: Romney's Taxes

In a discussion of Mitt Romney's Friday Afternoon Tax Info Dump, I added:

The letter from PWC is a brilliant piece of work, designed to create headlines that lull low-information voters but not actually inform. I particularly like the part where the "effective federal personal income tax rate" and "effective state personal income tax rate" and "effective charitable contribution rates" don't add up: 20.20%, 8.36%, and 13.45% (3/4ths of which is, presumably, tithing), but the "Total" line is "38.49% of your adjusted gross income for the period."

As others point out, the fact that we're getting 20 year averages rather than year-by-year breakdowns, and that IRS rules about amending and correcting tax returns are so generous (which is, arguably, why Romney was willing to forgo some deductions in his most recently filed return: in a year or two, he can amend and reclaim the money), means that a lot of questions aren't answered. Did Romney pay taxes? Apparently. Did he pay a "fair share"? Not by a long shot. Investment losses are deductible, so investment gains should be taxed at least as much as other forms of income. And there's good economic analysis suggesting that higher capital gains taxes are very, very good for economic growth because they discourage short-term thinking and profit-taking, aka gambling.

Picture: Things I Notice

This just in....

In 2006, this was a really useful blog. In a calculation based on number of posts, number of inbound links from other blogs and especially inbound links from high-ranking blogs, Ahistoricality was ranked 24th in usefulness to answer the question "If I can read 100 blogs, which should I read to be most up to date?" I actually made the cut for high efficiency, too. It's a good thing I was ranked high, because I don't read any of the other blogs in the top 100, unless someone I do read links to them.

What does it mean? Well, if I ever go looking for a paid blogging gig, it might be worth something, I suppose. Anyone looking to hire a history-minded news junkie with a digital photography habit?

P.S.: All you folks coming here from the various reprints of the list of influential blogs might be a little disappointed to learn that I'm on hiatus, more or less. Sorry, but I highly recommend working through my blogroll if you want to learn something!

Ref: Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks
Jure Leskovec, Andreas Krause, Carlos Guestrin, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne VanBriesen, Natalie Glance.
ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM KDD), 2007.