Jeffrey Yasskin’s blog

I’ve been thinking about taxes recently and reading Andrew Sullivan’s opinions on them, and I’m mostly convinced that a flat tax with a significant standard deduction/personal exemption is at least a reasonable idea. I haven’t yet convinced myself to support it, but I can’t think of any arguments against it. The Rockridge Institute has a good argument that rich people should be expected to pay more in taxes than poor people: they get more in return from the government. But that doesn’t easily extend to an argument that they should pay a higher percentage of their income. If you have a good argument against a flat tax, please comment.

If we assume that no tax should interfere with your ability to feed and house your family and that taxes should treat everyone equally otherwise, then we get the following system. First, add up all of your income. That includes both money you worked for and interest and capital gains. Subtract the poverty line for your household. Multiply that by the tax rate, which is the same for everyone. Pay that amount to the government. Oh, and payroll taxes are evil and should be rolled into the standard income tax.

tax        = net_income * tax_rate
net_income = income - poverty_line(your_household)
income     = earned_income + capital_gains
             + interest + forgotten_stuff?

Variations are possible on this theme. We’d probably want to keep some deductions, like for green vehicles, mortgage payments, and charitable donations. These can be subtracted from the net_income. Given deductions, we might want an alternative minimum tax, which could be simply (income - poverty_line) * lower_tax_rate, and then your tax is the larger of the two. Finally, we might want some tax credits. I suspect that these are a bad idea, and that the government should directly subsidize anything it is tempted to give a tax credit for, but they easily fit in as a decrease in the total tax.

In Tim Bray’s second post of opposition to Google AutoLink, he mentions that they owe it to their shareholders to do one of two evil things. Now, neither of Bray’s suggestions may actually be in Google’s long-term interest, but they certainly are in its short-term interest.

The basic question is, does our culture really believe that a corporation’s highest obligation is to its shareholders? That is, are corporations out there solely to make money? If a corporation obviously sacrifices sort-term or even long-term profits in order to, say, make the internet a better place for everyone, does it open itself up to shareholder lawsuits, as Cryptonomicon suggests? Corporations and their shareholders receive from society significant advantages simply because they are incorporated. They should be expected to give up some profits in order to give something back.

Scoble claims that Microsoft is a great place for Linux developers to work and that the kernel team is looking to hire some. Pardon me for being cynical, but this sounds like Microsoft is just trying to get some people to stop developing Linux. Sure, they’ll get some good kernel developers, but does anyone think they’ll let their new employees keep contributing to Linux in their spare time?

Despite what Java partisans will tell you, Java does not fully support Unicode. Unicode, since at least version 3.1 in 2001, defines 21-bit characters, and the surrogate pairs to encode them in UTF-16 have been reserved since 2.0 in 1996. Yet a Java char value is only 16 bits long, and a Java String consists of a sequence of characters. See anything wrong with this? The documentation for Java 1.4.2’s Strings doesn’t even mention this problem. Now, it’s always been handled by using UTF-16 to encode the strings, which preserves the data, but sometimes uses two chars to represent a single character. This means that the length() method returns a pretty meaningless result.

Java 1.5 finally admits that it has a problem and defines some new codePoint* methods to actually handle Unicode. This is a step in the right direction, but it only helps if developers actually use the new functions. Unfortunately, Sun has been lying that Java natively supports Unicode for so long that very few programmers are likely to realize that they need to change their coding habits. Sun doesn’t help by doing an incomplete job. They haven’t deprecated the old char-based methods and haven’t updated the CharSequence interface. And, of course, Sun employees need to stop claiming that Java has been based on Unicode since version 1.0.

I’m taking a class on DSLs this semester, and the first assignment was to write some trivial programs in Scheme. Haskell is so much prettier. I mean, just compare (lambda (x) (* x x)) to \x->x*x (the square function).

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The Food and Drug Administration regulates drugs wrong. They have a hugely long and expensive testing process which terminates in a simple yes-or-no decision about whether that particular drug can be sold. This delays the use of many life-saving drugs and drives up their prices when they are finally released. There is a better way.

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America’s immigration system is also outdated — unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border. It is time for an immigration policy that permits temporary guest workers to fill jobs Americans will not take….

George Bush’s 2005 State of the Union (emphasis mine)

Bush’s anti-worker bias is clear in this proposal for more corporate welfare. The idea that there exist any jobs at all which Americans will not take but Mexicans will, is simply bad economics. The archetypal example of this kind of job is garbage collector. It’s an unpleasant job that gets very little respect from the rest of society. In order to get enough garbage collectors, companies were forced to raise their wages. Let’s get this straight: Americans will do any job you ask them to, as long as you pay them enough.

But this isn’t good enough for Bush. Instead of allowing the market to do its job by paying workers more, he wants to keep labor costs down by importing workers who will be completely at the mercy of their boss. If they’re being mistreated or underpaid, they can’t look for another job. It’s their boss’s whims or back to Mexico. They’re forced to work for as little as their boss wants to pay, and this, in turn, drives down American wages. I’d be fine with easier immigration: new Americans can bargain for higher pay. But George Bush cannot be allowed to import wage-slaves.