Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2009

Totally unbiased study says “Guns=bad”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 23:48

In no way should you try to read the data from this study as being anything other than unbiased and objective:

Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates — according to their interpretation — that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.

“This study helps resolve the long-standing debate about whether guns are protective or perilous,” says University of Pennsylvania epidemiology prof Charles Branas. The Penn announcement is headlined “Gun Possession [is] of questionable value in an Assault”, so it’s pretty clear which way he’s leaning.

The Penn researchers carried out their study by randomly selecting 677 people in Philadelphia who had been shot in “assaults”. Apparently five people sustain gunshot wounds every day in the City of Brotherly Love, so there were plenty to choose from.

According to the profs, six per cent of the shooting victims were packing heat when they got plugged. They compared that to a control sample of Philadelphians who had not been shot, and concluded that “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun”.

Of course, there’s no problem with basing your statistically valid sample on people who have already been shot: given the chance of being shot in Philadelphia, they could just have gone round to a few local bars and found the same numbers, right?

You know that the study has a certain, um, preference, when even the folks at The Register are pointing out that the data may not be randomly selected:

There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot — for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc — would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.

The profs’ reasoning, however, would seem to be that if someone sticks you up in the street and you haven’t got a gun, you’ll just hand over your valuables and so escape with a whole skin. If you’ve got a gat, however, you might try to draw it and so get shot. Tactically, of course, it might be wiser to first hand over your wallet and then craftily backshoot the robber as he departed, but no matter.

Nearly half of American households face no income tax burden this year

Filed under: Economics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:43

Jeanne Sahadi writes that the direct income tax burden is far from evenly spread this year:

Most people think they pay too much to Uncle Sam, but for some people it simply is not true.

In 2009, roughly 47% of households, or 71 million, will not owe any federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Some in that group will even get additional money from the government because they qualify for refundable tax breaks.

The ranks of those whose major federal tax burdens net out at zero — or less — is on the rise. The center’s original 2009 estimate was 38%. That was before enactment in February of the $787 billion economic recovery package, which included a host of new or expanded tax breaks.

I guess that “soak the rich” plan really is working, then?

For those of a more “progressive” orientation, this is all to the good: those filthy rich paying disproportionally high rates is good, in their view. What it doesn’t take into account is human nature . . . just because they’ll pay that much this year doesn’t mean they’ll do nothing to change that picture next year or the year after that. The big risk being run here is that it will encourage “the rich” to reduce their taxable income (which often means switching from economically more productive uses to less productive ones) or even to remove themselves from the picture altogether (tax havens exist for a lot of reasons).

If only 1% of taxpayers are paying over 40% of the total tax collected, it only takes a few of them to move to a lower-tax jurisdiction to seriously impact the total taxes collected.

Doug Mataconis hopes that this will have a positive outcome:

Once the American people realize that “soak the rich” isn’t going to pay for all the things they claim they want from government, it’s entirely possible that they’ll decide that maybe the state doesn’t need to be as intrusive as it’s become over the years.

I’m not as confident that this is the lesson that most people would draw: once they’re comfortable with the idea of the government providing everything, they’ll be unwilling to go back to the “less civilized” model of having to provide for themselves.

Are the Democrats rediscovering a taste for civil liberties?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:57

There’s been very little I could find to praise in the performance of the current US majority party in both houses of Congress, until very recently. Democrats, including newly minted Senator Al Franken, are appearing to seriously threaten the renewal of several portions of the Patriot Act, due to expire this year:

Some Democratic lawmakers have long wanted to weaken the act, and now, with big majorities in the House and Senate, they have their chance. But the renewal debate just happens to come at a time when recently uncovered domestic terror plots — most notably the Denver shuttle bus driver and his colleagues caught with bomb-making materials and a list of specific targets in New York City — are highlighting the very threats the act was designed to counter. Republicans are fighting to keep the law in its current form.

“These three provisions have been very important for the investigative agencies who are working every day to protect us from terrorist attack,” says Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the committee. “Before the Patriot Act, terrorist investigators had far less authority to get records and documents than a DEA or an IRS agent.”

Democrats have proposed a number of changes, all of which would weaken the law. Sen. Russell Feingold wants to do away with the “lone wolf” provision entirely. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee chairman, would make it more difficult for investigators to obtain business records. In addition, Leahy wants to return to legal standards that existed before September 11 regarding “national security letters,” which are essentially subpoenas issued by the FBI and other security agencies. “They are going back to a September 10th mentality — literally,” says one GOP committee aide.

The original Patriot Act was “the most abominable, unconstitutional congressional assaults on personal freedom since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 made it a crime to libel the government” (Andrew P. Napolitano). It was a blank cheque for the one of the most far-reaching extension of law enforcement into the private lives of Americans in over 200 years (ranking with both Prohibition and the War on Drugs as liberty-reduction methods).

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