Category Archives: political economy

Distortions by Progressive-Democrats

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The latest are illustrated by two graphs from The Wall Street Journal. The graphs illustrate the impact on us taxpayers—rich and poor—of the recently passed tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The first shows in dollar terms the impact of the tax cuts.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians favor this graph because it emphasizes dollars while ignoring both their importance to the taxpayer relative to his income and it ignores the percentage of income received by each taxpayer and the percentage of the tax burden paid by each taxpayer—which for the rich is a larger percentage than their percentage share of income earned.

The second illustrates the changes in percentage terms, which demonstrate the importance of those dollars to taxpayers’ incomes.

Overall, the tax cuts become more important as income level drops from the wealthiest to the poorest. Those with increasingly lower incomes receive increasingly higher tax reductions relative to their incomes, with the poorest getting the greatest relative reductions. The Evil Rich—the top 20% of income earners—get far smaller relative tax drops, with the Evilest Rich—those heinous top 1% of income earners—getting the smallest relative drop.

And that’s entirely appropriate since they start out with the largest tax burden, one that’s much larger even than their relative share of income. This is a detail that Progressive-Democrats actively ignore in their distortionate descriptions of the bill.

My Sympathy Meter…

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…is flashing Empty. On a note related to another post of mine, there’s this out of Tucson, AZ:

Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), based in Tucson, Arizona, is reportedly facing financial and enrollment struggles after universal school choice passed in the state in 2022.
A TUSD official told KGUN that approximately 4,000 students used vouchers to either go to private schools or homeschool.
The trend of parents overlooking TUSD cost the school district about $20 million. TUSD’s Chief Financial Officer, Ricky Hernandez, told the local outlet that TUSD is “preparing for continued declines in enrollment as a result” of vouchers.

This, after TUSD as a whole had these test score outcomes, as of the 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 school years:

In Tucson Unified District, 28% of elementary students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 23% tested at or above that level for math. Also, 27% of middle school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 19% tested at or above that level for math. And 48% of high school students tested at or above the proficient level for reading, and 42% tested at or above that level for math.

Here’s a thought—bear with me on this; it’s a strange concept for many—maybe the TUSD managers and teachers should do a better job of teaching the children in their educational charge the basics and advanced principles of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with budgeting, finance, and economics added in for the district’s grade schools, junior highs, and high schools, respectively. Room in the school day for that last, especially, could be made by eliminating the claptrap of DEI, “flexible” gender, pornographic books in grade school libraries, and other Woke ideologies.

A Clear Choice

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The recently passed OBBBA has Federal funding for private school tuition in the form of tax credits—private schools being, primarily, charter and voucher schools. States must opt into the program, though; the tax credits won’t be available automatically.

As The Wall Street Journal headline put it, Blue States Face Big Decision. And then,

Now comes a protracted debate at the state level. Progressives and public-school groups object to funding private schools and say the new program will hurt public education. Supporters say the money will give families options outside of their neighborhood school.

The thing is, though, public schools are already beyond increases in hurting, especially in blue States—pupil test scores are bad and falling (rising recently only against the prior Wuhan Virus Situation school lockout steep drop), and public school’s pupil test scores especially lag those private schools’ student outcomes, as well as the test scores of homeschooled students.

A clear choice, indeed, and over the coming months we’ll see very clearly just how opposed to school choice and children’s education are Progressive-Democrat politician-run States and municipalities, and just how far in thrall are those politicians to teachers unions.

The Biggest Losers

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Progressive-Democratic Party New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a real threat to businesses domiciled in the city.

One of Mamdani’s most controversial proposals is a plan to launch government-run grocery stores in underserved neighborhoods.

Especially this, from 2021 when he was a city councilman:

…there are also other issues that we firmly believe in…the end goal of seizing the means of production….

Businesses would leave “in droves” if Mamdani gets elected, according to some. That’s the problem, though. Only those with mobile businesses—enterprises that can produce or sell their products anywhere, although factories of any size would be deucedly expensive to move. Businesses that can’t just pick up and go, though—the mom and pops, chain franchises that require hands-on direct customer-facing operations can’t. These include restaurants, fast food stores, gasoline stations, grocery stores, bodegas, food trucks, skating rinks, the list is endless: these businesses are trapped. And within a short time—one mayoral cycle, likely—they’ll be the ones left to pick up the city-imposed costs of operating in NYC.

And those small operations will be forced to compete against city government-run grocery stores, restaurants, gasoline stations, and on and on, businesses that have no worries about costs—especially with the city picking up, or waiving, the costs of rent and property taxes—because they’ll have the bottomless pocketbooks of the city’s coffers.

Yes, yes, Mamdani is only talking about government-run grocery stores. Who truly believes he’ll stop there? He’s already offering additions [from the first link]:

…eliminating subway fares, free municipal housing and childcare….

A Promising Technology

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An alternative to GPS-positioning and navigation—which is increasingly vulnerable to jamming and spoofing—is nearing operational capability, having already begun real world testing. Instead of receiving signals from satellites, this system is as self-contained as inertial navigation systems, but without the dependency on gyroscopes, which drift over relatively short periods of time. Instead, the system uses the varying degrees of magnetization ubiquitous in the earth’s crust. And it doesn’t even send out signals to measure that magnetization—I did say it was self-contained.

Inside SandboxAQ’s device, essentially a small black box, a laser fires a photon at an electron, forcing it to absorb that photon. When the laser turns off, that electron goes back to its ground state, and releases the photon. As the photon is released, it gives off a unique signature based on the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field at that particular location.
Every square meter of the world has a unique magnetic signature based on the specific way charged iron particles in the Earth’s molten core magnetize the minerals in its crust. SandboxAQ’s device tracks that signature, feeds it into an AI algorithm that runs on a single GPU, compares the signature to existing magnetic signature maps, and returns an exact location.

Exact location: the system currently is capable of matching, every time, the FAA’s commercial navigation requirement of specifying location to within 2 nautical miles. The system can get within a quarter of a nautical mile about two-thirds of the time.

The system already seems capable, in the defense arena, of sensing submarines and tunnels. For targeting over enemy territory, though, greater precision will be required. The question here, in my peabrain, isn’t whether such pinpoint accuracy can be achieved (there’s no doubt that it can), but how we will get magnetic crust mapping inside, say, Russia or the People’s Republic of China.

I suspect satellites can get those maps.