Monday, 18 April 2011
9 Things The Rich Don't Want You To Know About Taxes
For three decades we have conducted a massive economic experiment, testing a theory known as supply-side economics. The theory goes like this: Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperity—so much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates. The late Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who wanted to shut down public parks because he considered them socialism, promoted this strategy. Ronald Reagan embraced Friedman’s ideas and made them into policy when he was elected president in 1980.
For the past decade, we have doubled down on this theory of supply-side economics with the tax cuts sponsored by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, which President Obama has agreed to continue for two years.
You would think that whether this grand experiment worked would be settled after three decades. You would think the practitioners of the dismal science of economics would look at their demand curves and the data on incomes and taxes and pronounce a verdict, the way Galileo and Copernicus did when they showed that geocentrism was a fantasy because Earth revolves around the sun (known as heliocentrism). But economics is not like that. It is not like physics with its laws and arithmetic with its absolute values...
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David Cay Johnston @'Willamette Week'
HA! (for trnsnd)
50 reasons not to date a graphic designer
(Thanx Stan - who also pointed out 'what only 50!!!')
Sunday, 17 April 2011
Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold: 'Music has no inherent value'
The singer told the Sunday Times that file-sharing was crucial to the success of his band's 2008 self-titled debut album - and he continues to support such activity as the band prepare to release follow-up 'Helplessness Blues' later this year.
"How much money does one person need before it's just a number and I can buy whatever I want - and just be like a big baby?" he commented.
Pecknold has previously told BBC News that illegal downloading allows today's musicians to hear a wider range of music than previous generations.
"That will only make music richer as a platform," he said. "That [downloading] was how I discovered almost everything when I was a teenager - my dad brought home a modem."
Meanwhile, Pecknold has told NME that 'Helplessness Blues' was inspired by the nicotine patches he wore during recording sessions.
@'NME'
Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973/1975)
In Tools for Conviviality he carries further his profound questioning of modern industrial society by showing how mass-production technologies are turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines.
Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should “invert the present deep structure of tools” in order to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.”
First published in the U.S.A. by Harper & Row in their World Perspective Series, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen, 1973
Published in Great Britain by Calder & Boyars, 1973
First issued in Fontana/Collins, 1975
125 pages
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@'Monoskop/Log'
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