Happy winter solstice everybody. The days will now get longer. Light has defeated dark. Pagans everywhere rejoice.

The Indy Star has an article on legislators accepting bowl game tickets from Indiana and Purdue Universities and questioning whether this might be a conflict of interest. Is it a perk given to legislators that is not given to ordinary citizens? Yes. Is it given to curry favor with legislators who make decisions that affect the universities? Probably. But, somehow I don’t feel any sense of outrage. Maybe I’m jaded. However, it does give me an opportunity to trot out one of my favorite political quotes:

If you can’t take their money, drink their liquor, fuck their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don’t belong here.
—Jesse Unruh

One of the four remaining American World War I vets died Thursday. I don’t know why this strikes me as remarkable, time and humans being what they are. The former moves on inexorably and the latter die as a consequence. Maybe it’s a fact of my own aging. Growing up, World War I seemed like an accessible bit of history to me — like a modern event since plenty of people who participated were still alive in the 70s and 80s. The fact that Civil War veterans were all dead seemed perfectly natural since it was a “historical” event and somehow not as real.

Here is an item for the hardcore states rights, anti-tax zealots among you. The Lakota Indians have renounced their prior treaties and declared their independence from the U.S.A.

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.
. . .
Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licenses, and living there would be tax-free — provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

I wonder if the Ron Paul Liberty Dollar would be accepted currency in Lakota-land.

A California woman was arrested for providing nitrous oxide to her son and his friends.

The mother of a 13-year-old boy has been arrested for supplying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, used during her son’s ditch parties at their Lake Elsinore home.

Why shouldn’t those boys have to get their nitrous oxide from undisturbed cans of Reddy-Whip like every other teenage boy?

Investigators say the teenagers filled balloons with the gas and inhaled it.

Sherlock Holmes was obviously on the job.

O.k., I’ll have to admit that this story is of no importance at all, and I mainly wanted to use the headline.

Leo over at Opening Arguments cites a Wall Street Journal article warning against the horrors of increasing taxes on top levels of income.

Notably, however, the share of taxes paid by the top 1% has kept climbing this decade — to 39.4% in 2005, from 37.4% in 2000. The share paid by the top 5% has increased even more rapidly. In other words, despite the tax reductions of 2001 and 2003, the rich saw their share of taxes paid rise at a faster rate than their share of income.

Those poor abused rich people. The WSJ seems to make a big deal out of the steady climb of tax rates on the top 1% from 39.4% to 37.4%. Horrors! Except that’s a rounding error compared to the rates paid on high incomes between the Presidencies of Herbert Hoover and Ronald Reagan. From 70% on unearned income and 60% on earned income in 1970 down to 50% regardless of the income in 1982 down to 31% in 1992. If you recall, the Reagan/Bush I years were good for top income recipients but horrible for the National Debt.

Take a look at the top marginal tax rates over the past century.

Meanwhile, payroll taxes for social security are higher, but there’s a neat trick to that. Congress is borrowing money from Social Security to pay for general expenditures — in effect, using a more regressive tax to fund the government.

During the boom years of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the top rates were at a stunning 80 and 90% for the upper reaches of income. Obviously there were other factors at play in the post-war world, but those numbers at least show that confiscatory tax rates at high levels of income are not necessarily damaging to the economy.

It seems to me that, where previous generations grew the economy, our current approach is to mine it.