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Showing posts from April, 2012

How I Would Overhaul the U.S. Tax Code - Part V: Other Considerations and Concluding Remarks

Continued from  Part IV . Taxing the Lords of Finance  The financial crisis of 2008 has exposed deep-seated problems in our country’s finance sector. Besides the obvious dangers of over-leveraged banks, largely unregulated “shadow” banking operations and housing bubbles, the crisis demonstrated the unmatched political influence wielded by these businesses that were able to extract an enormous bailout over the loud, passionate objections of nearly everyone in the country. Many began to question whether some of these institutions had any redeeming social value whatsoever other than as a government-backed casino of the elites. Most of these problems can only be addressed through public engagement and legislation such as that passed into law earlier this summer. But it is worthwhile to note what role tax policy can play. Any true free market capitalist would be alarmed at the enormous profit margins that the financial industry enjoyed in the 2000s. In a well-functioning ...

Question of the Night

Is "abstract" or "concrete" more appropriate to describe the result of quantifying the intangible?

Ghetto Superstars

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Cotton Comes to Harlem by Chester Himes My rating: 3 of 5 stars Cotton Comes to Harlem  is an enjoyable and fast-paced detective thriller that reads almost like a screenplay due to its taut plotting, constant action, and a near constant focus on visuality. Of course, Himes does not sacrifice any of his sharp perspective the racial politics of America in the mid-twentieth century in service of genre approachability, though he takes a more vaudevillian, high entertainment approach when compared to the seething psychology of If He Hollers Let Him Go . For the record, I find the earlier novel to be a far more emotionally engaging and soulful work, though I can't deny this one is more immediately satisfying in many ways. Perhaps the most apt comparison would be between the endings of each work. The end of Cotton Comes to Harlem feels entirely pat to the point of almost appearing to be the last thirty seconds of another episode of "Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson ...

This Nightmare Called Life

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The Trial 1962.  119 minutes. Directed by Orson Welles. Watchdate: 12/08/2011. As I began to be drawn into Orson Welles' haunted, meditative Kafka adaptation, I found myself trying to put as much distance between myself and the images on the screen as possible. I pushed the movie away. My body seemed to be rejecting it. I wanted more than anything to go to sleep and not have to see what I was watching. A couple of days later while lying down perhaps nearing a nap, I found myself stricken rapturously with a mysterious fear that seemed to me to be a realization of what the movie meant. Or if not what it meant, then what it represented. Our minds seem programmed to look for more order and tidiness than this world could ever provide. This movie's dark caverns, its squalid canyons of confusion, its enigmatic hierarchy of colliding characters strips away that programming slowly, subtly yet inescapably. I have never experienced such a strong emotional response from a movie days afte...

Montréal Baroque

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Continuing on from Saturday's post about the exciting worlds on display at Johansson Projects , I wanted to acknowledge the wonderfully grotesque illustrations of baroque intricacy that of Montreal uses as album covers. Behold!: These look like the most fabulous nightmares of my life.

Alt History

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Went the Day Well? 1942.  92 minutes. United Kingdom. Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti. Watchdate: 10/06/2011. A surreal Graham Greene scripted propaganda about Nazi paratroopers impersonating English soldiers in a small town. It's  Red Dawn 1942 : Buñuel meets Hitchcock. And so we get a matron diving on grenade. We get a woman gracefully walking downstairs wielding a giant revolver. We get the best murder scene outside of Torn Curtain . In fact, perhaps it inspired Torn Curtain ? This movie may have inspired every dream that we call a movie.

Long Live Johansson Projects

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Another visit to Oakland Art Murmur last week has led me to conclude that Johansson Projects consistently presents the most compelling work among all the galleries I've visited on First Fridays. After February's Body Electric Victorian sci-fi fantasia , they may have topped themselves by displaying the lurid and vertiginous worlds created by Tadashi Moriyama in paintings, sculpture and animation. Like a monster reincarnation of Terry Gilliam and Hieronymous Bosch, Moriyama illustrates an intricate and intertwining panoply of neural degenerations, post-apocalyptic urban designs, classical forms, monetary signifiers, cosmic debris and technological phantasmagoria. Johansson Projects is an excellent destination for a trip through positively Borgesian imaginations.

How I Would Overhaul the U.S. Tax Code - Part IV: The Carbon Tax

Continued from  Part III . The Mechanics of a Carbon Tax Carbon taxes have been successfully implemented in many European countries. However, most of these countries do not rely on their carbon taxes as a primary source of revenue for the government as I am proposing. If the payroll tax were repealed, it would leave a hole in the budget of approximately $1 trillion. In order to raise this amount of revenue from a carbon tax, the U.S. would have to tax carbon at a rate of roughly $175 per metric ton emitted. Most European countries do not have a such a steep tax on carbon. However, Sweden started putting a tax on carbon comparable to what we would need almost two decades ago and has continued to experience stronger than average economic growth ever since. They also have a rate of carbon emissions per capita that is about one fourth of the U.S. average. If the U.S. achieved Swedish rates of carbon emissions, worldwide carbon emissions would drop by 15 percent. Sweden levies ...

Monster Child of God

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Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson My rating: 4 of 5 stars I have read few books this strange yet also this successful in executing their idiosyncratic vision of what a book can be if it sheds the normal genre and stylistic trappings that big industry often demands. While it's billed as a "novel in verse," Carson's book does not deserve such a reductive categorization, especially since it isn't written in meter (it does use line breaks so you could call it free verse I suppose). It a bildungsroman novel crossed with ancient myth, part poetry that reads much like prose, an fictionalized autobiography within an academician's frame narrative (which in itself reads like critical theory, or at times a series of syllogisms, except at the very end when it turns into a magazine interview). On top of all that, it's really, really funny. I laughed out loud while reading multiple times. Of course, no one can tell you what Autobiography of Red really is, yo...

Escaping the Colonel

I thought I had the perfect system. I had mastered climbing the gutter and drainpipe system of the house of suburban 70s stucco that my father had deemed acceptable to rent during an extended respite from living on base. I could climb in the window to my room while creating as minimal noise as possible that might echo and creak into my father's ear drums usually located on his head somewhere around the other side of the house. I had it made. At any hour of the night, I could come and go as I pleased. I don't know if I ever thought whether I had earned the right do so due to my fifteen dutiful years living under His thumb, I just knew I wanted to spend as little time locked up in His kingdom as possible. Those were wonderful months (or was it mere weeks?), and the freedom intoxicated me. The Saturday night that I silently twisted my body through the crack in the window and landed on my bedroom floor only to look up to see my father sitting up straight on the edge of my bed in ...

Train Time

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Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal My rating: 4 of 5 stars Bohumil Hrabel weaves a WWII-set bildungsroman that deftly moves between youthful melancholy and outlandish farce sometimes in the same moment. It's a dreamy, introverted book in many ways, just like its protagonist, yet it never shies away from addressing the politics and humanism that were constantly at stake in occupied Europe. While it never addresses the Holocaust directly, it's treatment of that incomprehensible level of brutality is unmistakable and very powerful in the book's more allegorical passages. Apparently, there's an excellent movie based on this book that I'll have to see someday.

How I Would Overhaul the U.S. Tax Code - Part III: The Progressive Consumption Tax

Continued from Part II . The Mechanics of a Progressive Consumption Tax Let’s look at how a progressive consumption tax would actually differ from the federal income tax by looking at the prospective tax bills of two fictional American families of very different means. The Smiths, a middle class family of four, earn $50,233 annually. That puts them very near the median income of the U.S. Under the status quo federal income tax, their first $16,700 of earnings is taxed at a 10 percent rate and the rest is taxed at a 15 percent rate. This adds up to a total liability of about $6,700. Without going into too much detail, we can assume that a family at this income level probably does not itemize deductions but is very likely to be eligible for benefits such as the child tax credit so their actual tax bill will be lower. Let’s assume a final liability of around $4,500. Now, let’s recalculate the Smiths’ tax liability under the progressive consumption tax. The Smiths would report $50,2...

Mannered Garbage

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The Makioka Sisters 1983.  140 minutes. Japan. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. Watchdate: 8/26/2011. I have never found a movie so shrilly boring or blandly unpleasant. I left the screening a good half hour before the movie ended because I just couldn't stand it anymore. And I never walk out of movies. The first forty-five minutes was perhaps the least horrible because I found my attention drifting away from the movie but when I actually forced myself to watch the damn thing I found it unbearable. The characters were not only charmless, but completely awful and not in an interesting way at all. The "humor" was predictable, stilted and worthless. Everything in the movie was effortfully overplayed to no purpose. I hated this movie (and I think I have fairly tolerant tastes).

Puzzle-mindedness

In third grade, I used to solve quizzles, wuzzles, phrase scrambles, commonyms, mad gabs, number blocks and hink pinks. I did this to please my teacher, Ms. Vasconcellos, who was the focus of a crush so secret I wasn't even fully conscious of it. Eventually, these word and logic games simply became an end in and of themselves. I was hooked on solutions, on thinking my way through to the answers to satisfy my brain. In class, Ms. Vasconcellos would emphasize what she called thinkable fun. There was no need to turn off your brain in order to have a good time. At home, I always had to follow orders. My father actively discouraged thinking for myself in many situations. Maybe that's why I liked Ms. Vasconcellos' class so much. I kept in contact with Ms. Vasconellos for years even after I finished elementary school. She would tell me about the latest ideas she would use in her classes like puzzle-mindedness which was, in her words, "the tendency to approach problems and ch...

April Resolutions

As has become my custom (the very idea of resolutions may require it), I failed all of my March Resolutions . Under the most generous approximation possible, I wrote just under 10,000 words in all of March falling short of even accomplishing fifty percent of my stated goal of 20,000 words. I completely forgot to read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and I had to return Heart of Darkness  to the library before I finished reading it. Luckily, I found a very cheap copy of Heart of Darkness  at Half-price Books and purchased it with the intention of finally finishing. I have lined up the possibility of a rewarding, full-time job this summer, but I won't know for sure if I have an offer until sometime this week or thereafter and so I consider the job resolution a failure as well. For this month, I have decided to take serial failure as an indication that I need to set more goals for myself in order to increase the chance I may succeed at one or another of them. Here goes: Write ...

Neocon Fever Dreams

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Iran is rotting from the inside. A profound destructive urge shrouds it in darkness. The deep rot in Iranian society can best be attributed to the fact that it is massively overpopulated. Massive overpopulation and highly congested living environments does very, very bad things to humans – and modern Iranians suffer horribly from these overly cramped conditions. No one should be forced to live like this. Maybe they would be better off dead. But this seems awfully extreme. We would sincerely prefer to find an alternative solution to the problem in consideration of the fact that Iranians, on the whole, are an intelligent and enterprising people, and thus would be an asset to many nations if a large emigration policy could be devised.  Perhaps we could reconsider bombing them if some of their excess populace would immigrate to Argentina or Canada, where there is plenty of room. Just a thought.