Sunspots 784

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: Sojourners tells us what the basic responsibilities of white Christians are, in these times.

Computing: Listverse tells us about 10 persistent myths about high-tech devices.


Environment: Gizmodo reports that COVID-19 is being used as an excuse to roll back various environmental regulations.
 
Finance: FiveThirtyEight analyzes the May jobs report.

Politics: FivethirtyEight argues that President Trump's use of force to break up a peaceful demonstration, for the sake of a photo opportunity, violates deeply held American values, not just Presidential norms.

FiveThirtyEight discusses the effectiveness (and not) of fact checking.

FiveThirtyEight also gives us data on prosecutions of police for alleged misconduct. There aren't a lot of prosecutions, and many of them don't result in conviction.


(and Sports) FiveThirtyEight says that support for Colin Kaepernick, NFL quarterback who refused to stand during the national anthem, four years ago, has significantly increased.

FiveThirtyEight also discusses what protests accomplish. 

Science: (and Christianity) An article in Christianity Today on the importance of birds to us, and, apparently, to God.


One-celled algae evolved into multi-celled organisms in less than a year, under selection pressure from a predator.

 
The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.

Thanks for looking!

Sunspots 712

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: Gizmodo reports that the Mona Lisa doesn't really have the Mona Lisa effect (the eyes follow you, whatever your position relative to the painting) but other paintings do have it.

Christianity: Christianity Today reports on the 50 countries where it's hardest to follow Christ. Only two of these are in the Western Hemisphere. India has risen, if that's the word, to being in the top 10 most dangerous countries.
Ken Schenck presents Biblical (and other) arguments for having women in ministry.


Computing: An article on NPR suggests that parents spend more time on-screen with their children. 
This article lists the top 10 moneymakers on YouTube, for 2017. The highest one was 7 years old at the time. See also this article in Scientific American, which says that technology use doesn't harm teenagers much, or any.

A Gizmodo reporter tried hard to live without Amazon. She found it to be impossible -- Amazon controls so much of the internet.

Google has an on-line phishing quiz -- can you spot attempts to harvest your information?

Finance: Listverse describes 10 jobs where you get paid for doing (almost) nothing.

Food: Earther reports that half, or more, of wild coffee species are likely to go extinct.

The web site for an institution that keeps samples of strains of microorganisms used to make sourdough.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight analyzes the chances, in the primaries, of 17 possible Democratic candidates for President.

FiveThirtyEight also reports on various legal cases involving the President.

S. E. Cupp is not happy that our troops, for the first time ever, are not getting paid during a government shut-down, and she blames the President.

Gizmodo reports that photos of the President, on his official social media accounts, have been edited to make him look better.

Science: A giant disk of ice is floating on a river in Maine, and slowly rotating.

Phys.Org reports that plants that get fresh water from sea water produce more brine than fresh water.


The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, I believe, it is public domain. 

Thanks for looking!

Sunspots 462

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:
The Arts: A four minute, 23 second performance of Leroy Anderson's Typewriter Symphony, with a real typewriter. (I know, some of you probably don't know what a typewriter is.) It's by a Spanish-speaking group, but that doesn't matter.
Computing: National Public Radio reports on those ubiquitous customer surveys -- how and why.
Politics: (or something) Linkedin has a post on how to get hired by Google, or any company.
Science: Wired reports on a person who has made some amazing videos of flocks of birds in flight, and discusses bird flock action. One brief video is included.
Wired also reports on the possibility that astronomers may be able to observe a gas cloud being "eaten" by our galaxy's central black hole.
And Wired has some splendid photos of objects in space.


Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 369

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Science:  National Public Radio reports on why raindrops don't kill mosquitoes when the mosquito gets hit.

NPR also reports on why horseshoe crabs have blue blood, and other things you almost certainly didn't know about these animals.

Politics:  (Sort of) The Brookings Institution has published an on-line interactive guide to the location of manufacturing jobs in the US.

Image source (public domain)

Taxes create jobs!

"Taxes kill jobs" - Speaker of the House John Boehner, at least once a day for the last few weeks. (At least it seems like it.)

That statement is an oversimplification, at best, and tends to be deceptive.

Why is it an oversimplification? How are Speaker Boehner and his staff paid? By the tooth fairy? No. By taxes.* And, of course, they have jobs, supported by US taxpayers.

The Speaker is partly right. Consider a hypothetical state or city where all income, business or personal, was completely taxed, all of it went to the government. Businesses would have little motivation to establish themselves in such an area, and, thus, there would be few or no jobs available. People looking for work wouldn't live there, if they could help it. Even the job of tax collector would be non-existent, because there would be too little tax money coming in to pay for such people. So, in that case, taxes would kill jobs.

However, consider the opposite situation, a state or city where there were no taxes. With no income, government would be unable to provide infrastructure, police and fire protection, a justice system, schools and hospitals, or regulatory apparatus, and, again, there would be few businesses, or people, who would want to locate in such a place. So no taxes would also kill jobs. A situation where there are tax revenues sufficient for the government to do its job would make job creation possible, rather than preventing job creation. So the Speaker is only partly right, and seriously wrong.

The Federal Aviation Administration has recently had to furlough about 70,000 workers, mostly construction workers, because Congress can't agree on funding the agency.

The ideal, then, must be somewhere between 100% and zero taxation. What rate is ideal? That's certainly a matter for legitimate debate, but to say that taxes kill jobs is not stating the full truth. Taxes can help create jobs.

There's another reason why taxes don't kill, but can create jobs. Private businesses do not generally engage in research into new areas of science. For example, most of the initial development of the laser, both theoretical and initial construction and assembly, was done by scientists in academic, or military laboratories, funded by taxes. Without the laser, CDs, DVDs, computer hard disks, and many other devices that we now take for granted, all of them requiring the employment of skilled labor to produce and repair, and all of them providing employment for salespeople, would not be possible. Although some fundamental research and development is carried out in industry labs, much of it is not, and it is usually the most radical research that is carried out in academic labs, and the most radical research often makes whole new categories of employment possible. Countries, or local areas, that develop these new categories will probably become more competitive. They will be adding new jobs. Much of our present position as the world's largest economy has been possible because of research and development done in the past, much of it funded by tax money.

The Internet, exploration of the solar system, large telescopes and similar devices, high-energy physics, and the human genome project, to name a few rather spectacular items, were developed largely with money from governments, that is, from tax money. At least the first of these has led to a great many jobs, and the others have or probably will also do so. To be sure, there have been major research endeavors funded privately, such as PARC, the Carnegie Laboratories, and Bell labs.

The United States didn't become an economic powerhouse by lowering taxes. It became so, at least partly, because of costly efforts, governmental or private, to carry out and implement scientific research.

Thanks for reading. Pay your taxes.

*I have been reminded that governments can get revenue in other ways than through taxes, such as through usage fees (like sewage fees, or license fees). But I'm describing them all as taxes, as the politicians in Washington generally do.

On August 1, 2011, I'm adding the following:
There are frequent assertions as to the effect of tax policy on job creation, by politicians of various persuasions. I saw part of a debate on this matter between Senators Durbin and McCain on this issue yesterday, on the Senate floor. My take is that there are too many variables. So many, in fact, that it's impossible to know for sure, for example, whether the so-called Bush tax cuts helped to create jobs, or didn't. Connection of tax policy to jobs has never been done as a controlled experiment, with a single independent variable (tax rate, or some other tweaking of tax regulations), accompanying the measurement of the dependent variable (number of jobs). It is impossible to perform such an experiment, with only one variable. Variables include fluctuations in world markets, changes in the number of people seeking employment, the prices of raw materials that we depend on (such as oil), tariffs on our goods, the values of other currencies and ours, and other variables. So politicians pretty much draw whatever conclusion they want from the data.

*  *  *  *  *

On December 20, 2011, I came across a posting by Politifact, a non-partisan entity, that discusses the matter of taxes and small businesses. It's a complicated subject, as they point out, but increasing taxes on the wealthiest persons would have much less impact on small businesses than Speaker Boehner has said.

*  *  *  *  *

November 10, 2012: I should have known about the Wikipedia article on the Laffer curve, which repeats much of what I said above, more authoritatively, and also says, that an analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office studied the probable effects of cutting taxes: [In the] paper's most generous estimated growth scenario, only 28% of the projected lost revenue from the lower tax rate would be recouped over a 10-year period after a 10% across-the-board reduction in all individual income tax rates. In other words, deficits would increase by nearly the same amount as the tax cut in the first five years, with limited feedback revenue thereafter.

* * * * *
June 22, 2016: Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not known for always anchoring his pronouncements in facts, has claimed that the US has the highest individual tax rate in the world. Politifact has researched that claim thoroughly, and determined that it is false. They do say that the US has a high, perhaps the highest, corporate tax rate in the world. 

Debt and taxes

I don't have the answers for all that's going on (or not) with the Congress and the President right now. But I think I know some Biblical principles.

1) Pay your debts. And, not only should they be paid, but paid when the creditor is expecting to receive them. The Golden Rule relates to that. So does a specific command in the Bible. (Leviticus 19:13b The wages of a hired servant shall not remain with you all night until the morning.) It is possible that failing to raise the debt ceiling will not result in economic disaster, although most economists say that it would. I don't know. But failing to raise the debt ceiling, which, unfortunately (see principle 2) is necessary in order to pay our obligations, would be a moral disaster.

2) Don't take on debts that you shouldn't. I don't have a specific verse in mind for this, but I think it's a sound principle, supported by scripture.

If we hadn't had trouble with principle 2, we wouldn't be worrying about principle 1, and, it seems to me, we need to do something about cutting down on our spending now. We should have done it before, but now is the best time we have. Let's do it. The deficit also needs to be addressed. We are spending too much. Let's do something about it, for now and for the future.

3) Don't deceive others. Speaker Boehner, and others, have said "taxes kill jobs." Perhaps that was just a sound bite, and taken out of context, but, as it stands, that's deceit, and surely the Speaker knows it. (He's not the only deceiver in politics, of course.) There are two obvious extremes on taxes. All income, of business or individuals, could be taken. Or none of it could be. In the first instance, there would be little incentive to work, or to develop business which might hire others. In that sense, the Speaker is right. But the second instance also would have terrible consequences. What legitimate business would want to establish in a location where there is no police or fire protection, no system of justice, no military protection, where infrastructure is not repaired or developed, where there are no schools or hospitals? What family would want to locate there, in the 21st Century? Taxes pay for these things, and, thus, some taxes are necessary. And, taxes do create some jobs, like, say, firemen or soldiers, or, for that matter, the job of Speaker of the House! Having these things, paid for by taxes, means that jobs may be created by the private sector, too. Too many taxes can kill jobs. So can not enough taxes.

Calling some things taxes is also deceptive. How a reasonable person can say that taking away subsidies for the production of ethanol from corn is a tax escapes me. The same thing goes for taking away special accounting treatment for hedge fund managers, or taking away tax breaks for oil companies.

Claiming that there would be no consequences for not paying our debts on time is also deceptive, because there would be moral consequences. (So, of course, would claiming worse consequences than we know to be true.)

4) Don't be selfish. Politicians should have the good of the country, not re-election, in mind. Seniors (I'm one of them) should have the good of the country, not expectation of social security income rising faster than inflation, in mind. Businesses should not be greedy. Neither should labor unions, and workers in general.

I am not particularly fussing at Speaker Boehner, just using him as an example. Apparently he has been making a good-faith effort to get us out of this current mess.

God help us all!

*   *   *   *    *

On July 22, 2011, I added the next to last paragraph, and made some additional changes.