To continue the trend of not writing about wingnut forwards (haven’t received any in a while), I want to address the Volcker Rule today. A financial reform bill is clearly badly needed, and one of the important items in this bill is this little piece called the Volcker Rule. On its face, it sounds like a great idea: limit the investment activities of FDIC-insured commercial banks. But those of us who bank or insure through USAA got an email last night urgently asking members to take action to modify this rule.
I guess I have not actually gotten back to the Texas education situation, though it may still happen. It’s hard to make writing here a priority. That said, I can still sometimes provide you with interesting things to read! Both of these are from FiveThirtyEight, which was one of my favorite blogs back during the 2008 election. Recently I started following the FiveThirtyEight twitter account, and so I’ve been reading more of the posts. Chances are good that most of you who actually bother to read this blog also read FiveThirtyEight anyway, but I still want to share these.
These posts are a two part response to a Jonah Goldberg piece. Goldberg is a clown; he pointed to Swarthmore as a hotbed of liberal fascism a couple years ago, which, well… Sort of isn’t worth responding to. Anyway, Goldberg is, surprise, complaining that those taxes the liberals inflict are just awful and fascist and so forth. So the first post breaks down tax burden by GDP, and also by the different types of tax:
The second article is more interesting, in my opinion. It looks at the GINI coefficient, which represents income distribution, and compares the US to other developed nations, both before and after taxes: