A taxing question

Interesting article by Michael Cooper in the New York Times using Maryland and Kansas to explain the bets different states are making with respect to taxes.

As state governments begin to emerge from the long downturn, many are grappling with a difficult choice: should they restore some of the services and jobs they were forced to cut after the recession — or cut taxes in the hopes of bolstering their local economies?

Now, the Times may have a bias toward liberalism or progressivism, even in its reporting, so it comes as no surprise to me that Maryland's decision (under a Democratic governor and legislature) to raise taxes in order to preserve services is portrayed a bit more favorably than Kansas' decision to cut taxes further in hopes of increasing its attractiveness to businesses.

Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas, who sought the Republican nomination for president four years ago, said that he was persuaded that his state needed to cut its income taxes and taxes on small businesses significantly when he studied data from the Internal Revenue Service that showed that Kansas was losing residents to states with lower taxes. “My viewpoint, and the viewpoint of the majority of the Legislature, was we’ve got to change our tax policy to attract more people and attract more businesses,” Mr. Brownback said in a telephone interview. “We’re just tired of losing in our league — I consider the surrounding states as our league — and we want to start gaining.”

[links omitted]

I have to wonder if Gov. Brownback is thinking clearly. I'm not saying he's foolish (though his fanatical religious devotion does render him less than clear-thinking or rational on certain issues), but these remarks make me wonder if he and the Legislature have asked themselves whether they truly understand why Kansas was losing residents. There is, evidently, a correlation between where ex-Kansans are moving and the tax rate, but as any statistician (or at this point, any reasonably experienced layman) will tell you, correlation is not causation.

Just because housing prices went down when you moved into your new home in 2007, doesn't mean you caused the downturn. Similarly, just because the tax rates are lower where Kansans are moving doesn't mean that's the reason they're moving to those places.

I have no idea what the data that the IRS provided says. Perhaps the IRS data doesn't provide crucial information that might suggest a different explanation. For example, could those fleeing the state be better-educated parents looking to escape the Kansas public education system's dreadful and much-ridiculed official stance on, say, evolution? When a state adopts such a transparently anti-scientific and anti-intellectual position, it loses credibility in the minds of those who would establish businesses that depend on rational thought and science, or those who simply would have their children taught the most accurate information science has to offer rather than religiously motivated claptrap.

It's not clear from the Times piece whether Brownback and his legislative allies are justified in drawing the conclusions they have. Their intentions are also suspiciously in line with Republican orthodoxy on the subject of taxes — enough so that were I a Kansan, I'd be asking the governor to prove that his assertion is the result of honest and thorough analysis rather than the ideologically determined outcome of a cursory examination of insufficient data.

And I'm asking the Times to give Brownback a chance to defend his tendentious statement. I think reporter Cooper and the paper owe him that.

Scientology: religion or racket?

Perusing a longish article in The Hollywood Reporter about Katie Holmes' and Tom Cruise's divorce — a subject which, I hasten to add, I have not been following in any detail (oh shut up, "methinks he doth protest too much"-ers) — I was struck by the lengths to which the Church of Scientology goes to discredit its critics. Some people consider the Catholic Church to set the bar for insular, self-protective organizations, but the Catholic Church is almost masochistic in the amount of self-criticism it tolerates compared to Scientology.

Then it occurred to me that the only thing that makes people more defensive than assailing their cherished truths is threatening their livelihood.

If you're still on the fence about whether Scientology is a religion or not, ask yourself this: does a belief system worthy of respect expend so much energy, time and money on silencing dissent and preventing believers from ceasing to follow the belief system?

(Yeah, certain sects of Islam might. Does that mean it's acceptable for Scientology, or anybody else, to follow their example?)

While I've always felt that Scientology is a dangerous cult, it now seems clear that its leadership isn't just a bunch of misguided zealots. They're scam artists who are fighting to keep their income stream flowing, and that won't happen if bad press turns off would-be recruits.

But don't take my word for it. Here's an observation by Charles Kimball, a professor of religion whose book When Religion Becomes Evil is a good read so far.

Authentic religion engages the intellect as people wrestle with the mystery of existence and the challenges of living in an imperfect world. Conversely, blind obedience is a sure sign of corrupt religion. Beware of any religious movement that seems to limit the intellectual freedom and individual integrity of its adherents.

It's actually hard to prove that Scientology limits the intellectual freedom and individual integrity of its adherents, because it does such a stellar job of limiting their physical freedom. That's about as strong a sign as can be that the most charitable interpretation of Scientology is that it is a corrupt religion.

The far more plausible explanation, though, is that Scientology is a colossal scam.

Stop calling it "the God particle"

The recent announcement of the apparent observation of the Higgs boson has gotten some media attention. A lot of it, actually. So much that I can't be bothered to link to any particular story. (I haven't read any of them.)

If you want to know more, search for "Higgs boson". Just please, stop searching for, or even thinking about, the term "God particle".

That's a horrible expression dreamed up by physicist Leon Lederman, according to the Wikipedia article on the Higgs boson. When the concept was largely unknown to the public the term might not have been so objectionable, but now it's a tired and embarrassingly sophomoric joke. It's also impolitic, as Peter Higgs himself points out.

Higgs, an atheist himself, is displeased that the Higgs particle is nicknamed the "God particle", because the term "might offend people who are religious".

The Higgs boson is neither evidence of God nor a proxy for Him, so enough with that stupid nickname. It's the Higgs boson. Surely that's not too difficult to use in everyday conversation.

Young vs. old

This probably isn't news to most of you, but the biggest chasm in outlook in the U.S. today isn't between the 1% and the 99%, but between the young and the old, as David Leonhardt's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times of a couple of weeks ago argues.

Beyond political parties, the two have different views on many of the biggest questions before the country. The young not only favor gay marriage and school funding more strongly; they are also notably less religious, more positive toward immigrants, less hostile to Social Security cuts and military cuts and more optimistic about the country’s future. They are both more open to change and more confident that life in the United States will remain good.

The hostility toward public education funding by a majority of the electorate across the country could be seen (and I had seen it) as a campaign driven by a resurgent libertarianism ("let me educate my kids like I want them educated") and a religious conservatism that embraced libertarianism on this front because it was convenient ("let me educate my kids so they have an appropriate respect for my religion, not like the godless secularists you liberal fantasists are creating in the public schools"). But it could also, and more cynically, be seen as a kind of protectionism for the older crowd ("if it's a choice between my elder care facilities and the schools, keep your mitts off my elder care facilities").

As the late-born offspring of Greatest Generation parents who are now gone, I was and am willing to support that generation: they gave a hell of a lot for this country and helped to make it the powerhouse it is today. However, as a cynical member of the generation immediately following the baby boomers, I have a lot less sympathy for the boomers. They helped to overspend and whine us into the fix we're in today. They could and should have taken up their responsibility for stewardship of the nation back in the 1970s and 1980s, when they became politically active, but instead, they lived up to their reputation for self-centeredness and embraced the promise that they could still have it all. Instead of recognizing that Jimmy Carter was trying to take the country in a new, better direction and that it would be a long, hard slog to get the country off of fossil fuels and a fiscally ruinous Cold War arms race (an arms race that did ruin the U.S.S.R. and led to its downfall), the boomers joined with my parents' generation to elect Reagan, whose "morning in America" proved a false dawn indeed. (The Greatest Generation had its blind spots, like the rest of us.) Reagan's administration led, philosophically, to the disastrous GOP of today, whose agenda's hallmarks are rampant anti-intellectualism, blind fealty to religious authoritarianism, unthinking acceptance of absolutely nonsensical fiscal policy, and a contempt for anyone who dares to question even the tiniest part of the agenda.

The Greatest Generation is, literally I'm afraid, dying off. I'm pretty sure that by the time any substantive change occurs in the benefits for the elderly, they'll be all but gone. To the extent, therefore, that the elderly are the ones getting in the way of what needs to be done to keep this country — to keep this planet — running in the long term, I feel no compunction saying, "the hell with them". My apologies to those of the boomer generation who understand this country's problems and have been trying to fix them: you're simply outnumbered and outvoted. The young and the educated have to take charge of this country's future, because the older generation has shown no indication that it has the ability or will to do so.

The hundred-million-dollar man

According to Politico, the Romney campaign "raised more than $100 million in June".

I would love to see the statistical distribution of both the sizes of the donations and the income of the donors. I have a hard time imagining the lion's share came as small donations from non-wealthy donors.

Freedom has two sides

This opinion piece in the New York Times by Kurt Andersen makes an obvious point that I somehow missed.

People on the political right have blamed the late ’60s for what they loathe about contemporary life — anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ’60s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967. Thanks to the ’60s, we are all shamelessly selfish.

To be blunt, libertarians make for a lousy country. A country requires its citizens to have some minimum sense of neighborly obligation. Otherwise, what makes it a country? What unifies it? What makes it more than an arbitrary set of geographical boundaries?

Happy 4th of July.

Apple owes me an apology

Actually, Apple Inc. owes me two apologies. (And I believe I'm correct in omitting the comma that would ordinarily precede "Inc.") Here follow the company's offenses.

1. Apple, through its iTunes Music Store, has knowingly and with ... well, perhaps not malice, but certainly with calculated indifference to my welfare made it too easy for me to give in to my baser, less evolved impulses and purchase pop music singles that I will regret in ten years' time just as surely as I regret buying that insipid Hanson song "Mmmbop" back in the day.
2. Apple, through its on-by-default spelling-correction service in iOS, has knowingly and with calculated indifference to everyone's welfare enshrined "it's" as the only spelling of "i", "t", and "s", with or without an apostrophe, that inadequately educated people recognize as correct.

I await satisfaction.