sarahlee310:

  Tax fairness: Little income, little to tax | The Economist

The brown bars are the “tax units” who are nontaxable because they’re straight-up too poor, even using the standard deduction alone. And too poor means pretty darn poor. $20,000 a year is not a lot of money to support a hungry tax unit, especially if it includes some little tax units running around in their pajamas with the floppy feet. Of course, up to $75,000 a year, you’ve still got a substantial number of people in the green bars: those who owe no federal income tax because they’re benefiting from tax expenditures. But which tax expenditures? Mostly, it’s the tax expenditures you get because you’re over 65, or because you’ve got the pajamas with the floppy feet: the child tax credit, the child and dependent care tax credit, and the earned-income tax credit. Less frequently, people qualify on the basis of “costs of earning income”, meaning they may be freelancers or small business owners. And so forth.

American society is becoming more unequal. Incomes at the bottom level are stagnant or declining, while incomes at the top are rising. This is why a large number of people at the bottom levels of the income tier don’t make enough money to pay any federal income tax. At the same time, we’re not collecting enough overall revenue to pay for our government spending. We could try to raise the money we need by repealing tax breaks for poor children and the elderly, if we were sort of mean and determined to hurt people who don’t have the political strength to resist, but I think it makes more sense to raise the taxes we need by increasing rates on relatively well-off people whose incomes have risen dramatically over the past couple of decades and can thus afford to pay them.

namelessgenxer:

We have identified the #1 Enemy of the United States and it is Teabagger Republicans.

abaldwin360:

Republicans are fiscally conservative.

/sarcasm

selucha:

My only commentary of the day on the royal wedding.

(Source: selucha)

aneth:

Louis XVI (January 21, 1793) was executed.

chocolatebreath:

To Kill An IDea 02 (by scottlava)

criminalprofiler:

Guillotine

Survival time: 1-2 minutes
Beheading machine, so called from the French physicist Joseph-Ignace de Guillotin’s name, who proposed its adoption in 1789: as decapitation was considered the most humane and less painful execution method, Guillotin suggested the construction of an apposite machine.
It consists of two beams hoisted vertically, sunken in the middle and joined in the top by a crossbar, and of an oblique blade, tied with a rope to the crossbar. The sentenced puts his neck in a pillory-like structure which the blade will pass through; when the rope is released, the blade slides along the beams and falls onto the sentenced’s neck, cutting his head off, and the latter ends up in a basket placed in front of the guillotine.
It was heavily used during the French revolution.

sebastianbrilliance:

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the French physician who proposed the use of a mechanical device to carry out death penalties in France. While he did not invent the guillotine, and in fact opposed the death penalty, his name became an eponym for it.