Comments | cocotopia: A little fiscal perspective, if you please.

cocotopia

A little fiscal perspective, if you please.

Mar 02, 2010 23:45

When people complain about how entitlement programs, infrastructure repair, etc. cost too much;
When Senators obstruct solutions to life-or-death issues, fretting about our grandchildren's debt burden;
When anyone gets a rosy glow about the good old days when Americans valued rugged individualism instead of government handouts and IRS robbery;
It ( Read more... )

Comments 5

smadaf March 3 2010, 05:02:21 UTC

I'm not confident I know enough to say just how many people of a certain income are holding a grudge, or what they're moaning about; but I like your highly informative table and will set to making it into a colorful graph!

cocotopia March 3 2010, 15:20:41 UTC

Noted and amended, thanks!

smadaf March 3 2010, 18:31:15 UTC

I like the new version better. :)

Am I turning into Ross Perot? smadaf March 3 2010, 08:26:29 UTC

Nothing spectacular, but here are the lower limit of the top bracket and the percentage paid by the top bracket and by the $200,000 bracket (versions one and two). Made in Microsoft Word 2003. I'm not sure, but I probably copied accurately the data you gave. I release these to the public domain.

Re: Am I turning into Ross Perot? cocotopia March 3 2010, 15:38:18 UTC

Wow! Thanks!

I think of the lower limit of the upper bracket as kind of parenthetical, since it seems to be almost arbitrary: when it was high there were generally more brackets with narrower ranges. But maybe it does deserve its own graph. I'll leave it to people who didn't zone out in history class to find significance there.

I went looking for data over the same years on the percentage of people in poverty. Didn't find enough to add a third column. Would be interesting to see if "trickle down" economics ever worked. Did find that before FDR it was massively higher than ever afterward. No big surprise there. (I keep seeing scenes from "Annie" in my head.)

Ross Perot's campaign was one of the better things that have happened to this country in my lifetime. I didn't agree with all of his politics, but he was a breath of fresh air on the political scene. He also got people thinking about issues they had been completely ignorant of, and that's always a good thing.