Todd Suomela's Library tagged fairness →  View Popular, Search in Google

We can see, then, that the tax system in the United States violates the fundamental principles of income taxation. Those are “vertical equity,” which says that those with upper incomes should pay a higher effective tax rate than those with modest incomes — as far back as Adam Smith, ability to pay has always been a core principle of taxation — and “horizontal equity,” which says that those with roughly the same income ought to pay roughly the same taxes.

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"Luckily, research (pdf) by Guido Heineck tackles just this question. Unluckily, his findings are depressing.

He looked at the correlations between UK individuals’ earnings and “big five” personality traits, controlling for other things such as age, education, marital status and region."

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wall-street protests activism politics fairness economics rhetoric

"The Congressional Research Service found that 200,000 millionaires — almost two-thirds of taxpayers with taxable income above $1 million — paid a lower tax rate (combining income and payroll taxes) than the typical taxpayer making less than $100,000."

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"Many journalists, it seems, pay lip service to the First Amendment, but turn their backs or grow disdainful when people actually exercise these rights in the streets. In such a climate, idealistic activists such as those at the tar sands pipeline and Wall Street protests, obviously, can be safely ignored by the major news media or condescended to as not being rooted in the practical, real world. Real grown-ups don’t need to protest."

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"It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously. Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve. It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other."

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"In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them? "

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"This is a familiar move in political argument (it is related to the tu quoque, or “so’s your old man” move). We saw it in spades a while ago when Democrats lamented the incivility of public discourse and blamed right-wingers for proclaiming over and over that President Obama was a foreign Islamic usurper working to undermine American values. The right replied by rehearsing the litany of things said by democrats about George Bush — he was a tool of corporate interests, a warmonger and an enemy of civil liberties. So what gives you the high moral ground, those on the right asked, when you were equally vile in your accusations?

I want to say that this is a bad move (and a cheap trick) because it deflects attention from the substantive claims being made and puts the spotlight instead on propositional consistency. The better move (by either party) would have been to insist that Obama or Bush was in fact those things and to back up the assertion with the marshaling of evidence. The better move, in short, would have been to take a stand on truth rather than shifting the focus to a calculation of reciprocal fairness. What gives someone the high moral ground is that he or she is right, not that he or she is fair."

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"the theory of the moral economy. In its essence, the theory holds that the fact of sustained violation of a person's moral expectations of the society around him or her is a decisive factor in collective mobilization in many historical circumstances. Later theorists of political activism have downplayed the idea of moral outrage, preferring more material motivations based on self-interest. But the current round of activism and protest around the globe seems to point back in the direction of these more normative motivations -- combined, of course, with material interests. So it is worth reexamining the idea that a society that badly offends the sense of justice of segments of its population is likely to stimulate resistance."

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Connection to the fairness doctrine.

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