Daily Archives: 12 May 2012
Romney Rally
Compare this to the thousands of people Ron Paul continues to draw.
10 Disgusting Examples of Very Young School Children Being Arrested, Handcuffed and Brutalized By Police
#1 At an elementary school in Baltimore recently, three nine-year-old girls and an eight-year-old boy were arrested for fighting and marched out of their elementary school in handcuffs. The police department is defending handcuffing these kids….
“It’s our policy, regardless of the age, when a suspect is arrested by police, they’re handcuffed. And the reason is just not for the suspect’s safety but also for officers’ safety,” Det. Jeremy Silbert of the Baltimore City Police Department said.
#2 In New Haven, Connecticut a 10-year-old boy was actually arrested by police for giving another student “a wedgie” on a school bus.
#3 Just last year, a 5-year-old boy at a public school in Stockton, California was arrested by police and handcuffed with zip ties because he was committing “battery on a police officer”.
Really?
How much damage can a 5-year-old kid really do to a police officer?
The boy was ultimately sent to a hospital and forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
#4 A 6-year-old girl down in Florida was “throwing objects, hitting administration personnel and screaming uncontrollably” so police handcuffed the 40 pound little girl and shipped her off to a mental institution for evaluation.
#5 In San Mateo, California a few months ago a 7-year-old special education student was blasted in the face with pepper spray because he would not quit climbing on the furniture. Police were then able to subdue the boy and he was “committed for a psychiatric evaluation”.
#6 Down in Florida, an 11-year-old student was arrested by police, thrown in jail and charged with a third-degree felony for bringing a plastic butter knife to school.
#7 In Texas, a 12-year-old girl was recently arrested by police for spraying two bursts of perfume on her neck. She was formally charged with a misdemeanor.
#8 A 13-year-old boy at a public school in Albuquerque, New Mexico was recently arrested by police for burping in class. The police marched him out of school and hauled him over to a juvenile detention center.
#9 Back in 2010, a 12-year-old girl at a school in Forest Hills, New York wrote “I love my friends Abby and Faith” on her desk. The police were called out and she was marched out of her school in handcuffs in front of all her friends.
#10 A teenage couple down in Houston, Texas poured milk on each other during a squabble while they were breaking up a while back. Instead of being sent to see the principal, they were arrested by police and sent to court.
(Read more)
Knesset members celebrate latest E. Jerusalem settlement by posing on evicted Palestinian family’s sofa
Following last week’s eviction of the Palestinian Natcheh family from their Beit Hanina home, Israeli Knesset members Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad visited the house now inhabited by some eight settlers. To mark the occasion they posted a picture of themselves lounging on the Natcheh’s sofa on Facebook.
“We are at the start of the establishment of a new Jewish neighborhood in the area, which will create a continuous sequence of Jewish neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem,” said Eldad to the settler online mouthpiece, Israel National News. “Only the stubbornness of the Jewish landowners and Aryeh King of the National Land Redemption Fund ultimately led to the achievement of the day and we are confident law enforcement agencies will be required from now on to remove Arab squatters from all the properties of the Jews in the area.” Ben-Ari and Eldad “affixed mezuzahs” inside of the house, rituatlistically marking the takeover.
The Knesset ministers hope to judaize Beit Hanina, though historically there have never been Jewish residents in this East Jerusalem neighborhood. On Facebook, Ben-Ari said the settlers will build 50 new housing units on the property. (Read more)
Nobel Laureate Economist: Prices Don’t Matter
Mainstream economics proving its irrelevance, yet again.
n today’s Wall Street Journal, Nobel laureate Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez write “High Tax Rates Won’t Slow Growth”. This is certainly out of the box thinking – the box that defines the foundation of economics. The First Law of Demand states that as prices go up demand goes down. This is apparent to all of us who do our own shopping. Taxes are part of the price of that which is taxed, so higher taxes will necessarily reduce that activity. For example, taxes on cigarettes reduce smoking.
But Diamond and Saez tell us the Law doesn’t apply to income taxes on high-income earners; that raising taxes on them will not reduce their propensity to work or invest for the long-term:
“But will taxable incomes of the top 1% respond to a tax increase by declining so much that revenue rises very little or even drops? In other words, are we already near or beyond the peak of the famous Laffer Curve, the revenue-maximizing tax rate?
The Laffer Curve is used to illustrate the concept of taxable income “elasticity,”-i.e., that taxable income will change in response to a change in the rate of taxation. Top earners can, of course, move taxable income between years to subject them to lower tax rates, for example, by changing the timing of charitable donations and realized capital gains. And some can convert earned income into capital gains, and avoid higher taxes in other ways. But existing studies do not show much change in actual work being done.”
Existing studies can be rigged in a lot of ways, for instance by ignoring the long-term effects of lower after-tax wage rates. Do these studies somehow measure the propensity of school children to work towards a medical degree under conditions of high versus low doctor salaries? And what are the effects on would-be entrepreneurs?
Taxes matter, though it is certainly true that the degree to which they matter depends on a number of factors, including the type of tax, the culture, the relative income of those being taxed, etc. However, Diamond and Saez tell us that cross-country and historical evidence provides no support for the idea that income taxes affect growth:
“There is no clear correlation between economic growth since the 1970s and top tax-rate cuts across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.
For example, from 1970 to 2010, real GDP annual growth per capita averaged 1.8% and 2.03% in the U.S. and the U.K., both of which dramatically lowered their top tax rates during that period, while it averaged 1.72% and 1.89% in France and Germany, which kept high top tax rates during the period. While in no way does this prove that higher top tax rates actually encourage growth, there is not good evidence from the aggregate data supporting the view that higher rates slow growth.”
My recent study comes to just the opposite conclusion, showing a strong correlation between top marginal rates and growth in the OECD over the last 11 years. (Read more)