“Translucent is my *favourite* opacity.” This was said by S earlier this week, and it brought up the question: what other unusual favourite things do people have? Do you have a favourite sense? Perhaps a favourite colour of road marking? A favourite aspect ratio?
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1000 years of European History
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/greek-election-aftermath-1000-years-context
Combined with some cool music. 🙂
Earthquake visualization
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a–NC4Nong#!
Sir, Syrup, Surreptitious
0th world problems
“Heaven’s out of toilet paper. You have to wipe your butt on a cloud.” -SN
But really, what would a 0th world problem be like? We have First world problems, like your internet not being fast enough, or having to wait 3 hours at the ER for your free non-emergency health care.
For that matter, what is a second world problem?
History repeating itself first as a farce?
-N 😀
Parch, mint, parchment
This is an ages old question, similar to the questions on “Mank” and “Ind” asked by Jack Handy. More importantly, this post is a test of my new fb plugin.
Marginal Tax Rates II
So, after my last post on marginal tax rates, there were a few questions about what it was/why it was important/etc…
So, we can start with Wikipedia, but basically, the marginal tax rate is how much tax you pay on your last dollar of income. Or conversely, how much of your last dollar of income you keep. It is a measure of how incentivized the population is to do ‘just a little’ more work. In most modern societies, the tax structure is set up (at least in theory*) such that the more money you make, the higher the marginal tax rate, to try to even out the wealth distribution a little.
The previous post showed the following graph:
Which shows some of my inability to make a pretty graph with Excel, but more importantly shows that the marginal tax rate is highest for those making the least amount of money. This disincentivizes work (at least, not under-the-table work) among those on welfare. Most people who are interested in a rational economic and social policy think that this is insane. Not only are you discouraging those most desperate from working for a living, you’re also reducing the tax base at the same time.
Basically, if you’re on welfare, and get a part time job, you will lose more than half of your income to clawback and taxes.
You also create a large barrier to workforce entry, and encourage people to stay on welfare, rather than gradually bringing themselves out (this is also hard on those who can only work part time for family or other reasons).
There are a number of reasons why this might have been implemented like this, inertia combined with evolution, for one, but probably including a healthy dollop of Puritan “if you don’t succeed, you’re not trying hard enough”.
So, what should we do about this? I will leave most of that to the comments, but my assumption is that the goal is to have as large a portion of the population as possible productively employed (you can define this however you want), to the best of their abilities. There are a lot of things you can do with tax structure to accomplish this, but let’s start with the marginal tax rate.
*Capital gains taxes will likely be a later blog post here
Marginal Tax Rates
People talk a lot* about marginal tax rates**. You often hear that the income tax rate is going down from 16% to 15.5%, or that the highest marginal tax rate is now 29%. What we don’t talk about is the full structure of the tax system, and what the marginal tax rate is overall as you go up (or down) in income***.
Looking at the above graph, you may notice a few things. One is that the highest tax rates are paid by those with the least income (this is largely due to the 50% clawback of all income for those on welfare). The marginal tax rates for those earning less than $15k are never reached by anyone earning more than $15k. Many consider this a very strong disincentive to work (or at least a strong disincentive to report income).
There are a few oddities in the graph:
Around $15k, the spike is caused by the loss of the welfare prescription drug benefit
Between $43k and $49k, the tax rate decreases by about 7%, because Employment Insurance and Canada Pension Plan contributions max out
The spikes at $20-25k, $36-38k, $48k, $72k, $201k are caused by the strange way that the Ontario Government implemented the Ontario Health Premium
It might be interesting to overlay this graph with a graph of what percentage of the population is in each category, and what percentage of each of those groups vote.
-Nayrb
Some calculations:
Welfare: $224 basic needs, $368 shelter allowance
Welfare: $592/month = 7104 + 848/yr = 7952/yr
(includes ** Includes 2010 Ontario Energy and Property Tax Credit and 2010-11OntarioSales Tax Credit.)
*Well, probably not that much.
**Marginal tax rates in this instance are defined as the amount of tax paid per thousand dollars of income (marginal tax rate at $10k income would be: (Tax paid @$10k-Tax paid @ $9k)/$1000 )
***This post assumes Toronto, Ontario residents, 2011 tax rates, single adult
References:
http://www.socialassistancereview.ca/income-assistance-and-other-benefits
http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/en/mcss/programs/social/directives/directives/ODSPDirectives/income_support/6_1_ODSP_ISDirectives.aspx
http://www.rev.gov.on.ca/en/taxcredits/CalculatorQuestions.asp
www.caledoninst.org/Publications/PDF/488ENG.pdf
http://www.e-laws.gov.on.ca/html/regs/english/elaws_regs_980134_e.htm#BK59
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/tg/rc4210/rc4210-e.html#P137_11147
http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/fq/txrts-eng.html
The Desultory Beep
So, we were in New York a couple of weeks ago.  It was an amazing experience, one of the main highlights being MoMA, specifically an exhibit by Francis Alÿs entitled “A Story of Deception”. The descriptions at the exhibit suggested that he was trying to capture the nebulous feeling of Mexico’s and by extension latin america’s interaction with modernity. There was a small constellation of nebulous feelings that seemed to bracket what he was trying to express. The feeling of always seeking, striving, but never really getting there, the feeling of doing a task very intently for a long period of time that to the outside observer seems pointful but when watched/performed to its conclusion is not so much so.
What I found so engaging about the art (and so disappointing about the wikipedia article about him) is that the curation brought out the ideas that the artist was trying to express. (And also sound installations that were done well.) I don’t know if it’s a failing of language, or an inability of most people to cogently express complex thoughts, but most of the modern art I’ve seen fell short of what I think it was capable of because the curation, or something else about the situation inhibited the meaning from coming out.
This is a long-winded way of getting to concept that is the title of this post, “The Desultory Beep”. “Desultory” was my favourite word for the week we were in New York, not least because I really liked to feel of the word, but also I think because it expresses a feeling that is difficult to express.
We were staying in a hotel in Manhattan, and it seemed that at all hours of the day and night, there was a near-constant chorus of honks from the street down below. (These very quickly became hilarious, but that is another story.) Every so often, there would be a chorus of honks, some sort of back and forth, then a last desultory beep to end it off.
But how do you express that feeling, of the last lonely, somewhat embarrassed, perhaps feeling slightly left-out beep?
Post Alpha
My whole life, as far back as I can remember, I’ve been working to get closer to my intuition, and make thoughts more conscious earlier in their gestation period. After a particularly hilarious mostly unseen fireworks show*, I have the image of a bunch of fish-thoughts swimming under the sea, and I can only make them conscious when they jump out of the water. What I’ve been trying to do is reduce the height they have to jump before bringing them into consciousness**, perhaps trying to lower the water level***.
Let’s see what happens.
-Nayrb 😀
*It was my birthday, and we were watching my birthday fireworks from the graveyard behind Mel Lastman square, and we were quite proud of having found such an unoccupied space to sit, then we noticed that we could only see the fireworks at the extreme top of their arcs, over the tall building in front of us.
**There are a bunch of levels of conscious thought, at least as far as I experience them, saying things out loud is one of the last/most conscious ones…writing them down might be even more so, but that is another post.
***I don’t come close to fully understanding this analogy yet. Another post.