Isegoria

In Highest Income Earners Pay Most Taxes, the National Center for Policy analysis lists some interesting IRS data:

The data show the distribution of the tax burden by income group, or, in other words, the share of total federal personal income taxes paid by each income group:

The top one percent paid 34.75 percent of federal personal income taxes. [...] To rank in the top 1 percent, you had to report adjusted gross income (AGI) of $269,496 or more.

The top 5 percent of taxpayers paid about 54 percent of total personal-income taxes and had AGI of at least $114,729.

The top 10 percent of taxpayers by income had AGI of $83,220 or more. The top 50 percent of taxpayers had AGI of at least $25,491. The 4.21 percent share paid by the bottom half of taxpayers was virtually unchanged during this period.

The top half paid almost 96 percent of all income tax. Wow.

Glen Whitman continues his discussion of socialized medicine on his Agoraphilia site:

Healthcare and health insurance are not the same thing. As Amy observes, you can buy healthcare without having health insurance, and you can have health insurance that does not pay for certain kinds of healthcare.
[...]
If you give people a choice about how much free healthcare to consume, a great many of them will consume as much as they possibly can. They will continue to buy healthcare goods and services long past the point where the benefits justify the costs. This is particularly true with regard to optional procedures designed to boost quality of life, such as acupuncture and massage therapy. But it’s also true of various aspects of other, more “serious” procedures. Given the option, people will stay in the hospital for longer stays, always choose the private room, take more pain medication, opt for name-brand over generic medicines, demand more frequent nurse visits, sign up for an extra month of physical therapy, etc. And while nobody chooses to have terrible conditions like, say, lung cancer or AIDS, they do choose how much to expose themselves to the risk of such conditions through their choices about smoking, drinking, eating, sex, and so on. When you insure people against risks, they tend to take greater risks; this phenomenon is known as moral hazard. The only way to assure that people purchase healthcare products if and only if the added benefits exceed their added costs is to face them with a price at the point of sale.
[...]
Trying to make healthcare free is a good way to make it more expensive. [...] If you’re unwilling to face people with a price for their choices, the only other option is to limit their choices via bureaucracy and/or queuing.
[....]
Liberals, listen up: Socialization encourages regulation of lifestyles. Why? Because as healthcare becomes increasingly expensive (see previous point), political pressure will mount to get costs under control. Once everyone is paying for everyone else’s care, your personal lifestyle choices are no longer just your own. The argument that your actions “don’t hurt anybody” no longer flies, because your risky choices affect everyone else’s expected tax bill.

Remember inflation? In a Shift, Fed Signals Concern Over Deflation in Its Statement:

But in the past few years, as underlying inflation fell below 2% for the first time since the 1960s, Fed officials began to realize that it could go too low. In the past six months, underlying inflation has been running at just 1% based on the Fed’s preferred measure, the price index of personal consumption excluding food and energy.

When inflation is close to zero, an unexpected shock or prolonged period of economic weakness could push the economy into outright deflation, that is, generally declining prices. Deflation weakens the Fed’s ability to boost spending because interest rates can’t go below zero. Deflation also makes it harder for businesses and individuals to repay debts because their incomes fall while their debts are fixed.

Most Fed officials think deflation is highly unlikely, but they have been sensitized to its dangers by Japan’s battle with deflation, which has crippled its economy and weakened its banking system.

I can remember when everyone complained about inflation. According to the article’s graphic, inflation almost hit 10% in the late 70s and early 80s.