Trickle-UP Economics

Top Marginal Rate vs GDP Growth

More Tax Graphics

Tax History

Have Violent Video Games Gone Too Far?

Call of Duty: Black Ops has just released it's trailer, entitled There's A Soldier In All Of Us, showing real people (including celebrities like Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel) in actual combat scenarios in lieu of scenes from the game.

How much more can our society glorify war, violence, and antisocial behavior if not by showing real people enjoying the death and destruction of a sovereign nations' citizens and towns as if it's a sport? Maybe I wouldn't find the video as disturbing if it did involve a war that is currently active with soldiers and innocent civilians dying every day...

In my opinion, all the ad and game it's trying to sell succeeds at doing is furthering the dehumanization of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who've died and continue to die in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and anywhere else our military/CIA/war contractors are operating without our knowledge. Perhaps if the commercial was set in Chicago, Boston, NYC, or some other US city that used to be a functioning community before being ravaged by war, people would have a different response. After all, is this how you'd like your hometown portrayed in the media of another nation that is still actively killing US civilians (accidental or not)?

As the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Schwarzenegger v Entertainment Merchants Association case involving California's ability to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors, I feel like this commercial is a perfect example of the normalization of war/violence endemic in our media caused in part by video games like Call of Duty: Black Ops, which will only get worse as graphics become more realistic.

Perhaps I'm just overreacting or idealizing the games that I grew up playing but I see a big difference between hyper-realistic games like Call of Duty and cartoon-based games like Contra, Double Dragon, and even early editions of Grand Theft Auto.

One thing that I find interesting as the Entertainment Merchants Association argues that it's members free speech is somehow different than other forms of regulated commercial speech like porn, alcohol, and cigarettes is that CallOfDuty.com requires people to be over 18 in order to access the site, employing the same online age verification tool as the very industries it's trying to claim differentiation from. See for yourself:

• Smirnoff (21+)
• Hustler (18+)
• Marlboro (21+)

In case you think this game is an anomaly or an exception, here are some statistics on the Call of Duty series:

• Modern Warfare (previous release in the series) holds the single-day record for any entertainment medium with $401 million in sales (4.7 million copies sold) when it was released on 11/10/2009.
• Pre-orders of Black Ops are on track to match sales of Modern Warfare
• The Call of Duty series (7 games total) has accounted for more than $4 billion in sale

As a side note, if a Supreme Court Justice has never played a modern video game, does that disqualified them to hear the case?

Tax and Spend or Borrow and Spend?

Tax Day: The Reality of Class Warfare

As the Tea Party ramps up its Tax Day protests around the country, I'd like to introduce some facts and reality to the equation.

As the graph on the right shows (courtesy of the geniuses at WolframAlpha), the average federal tax rate in 2007 was 12.84%, a far cry from the 40% the median Tea Partier believes the rate to be.

The bar chart, however, paints an even more telling picture. How have the ultra wealthy (those making more than $2M annually) changed our tax system from PROgressive to REgressive? If this is proof of blatant class warfare, I don't know what is...

To quote Warren Buffett:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Also, as he said at a $4,600-a-seat Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2007:

“The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Is that the type of country we want America to be?

The Need for Filibuster Reform

As over 290 bills that have passed the House sit idle in the Senate due to the unprecedented obstructionism currently being displayed by the Republican minority, the need for filibuster reform has been thrust into the forefront.

For those not familiar with the filibuster and cloture process, when either of them are invoked, a supermajority (60) of senators is required to bring a bill to debate and close the debate to bring the bill to a final up-or-down vote.

Why should a Republican minority of 41 senators that represent only 37% of the US population be able to bring the nations business to a grinding halt? If you'd like to check my math, you can see my numbers here. (which were from the most recent census estimates)

To give you an idea how big the disparity of representation in the Senate is, consider the two extremes:

Barbara Boxer/Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): 12.09% or 36.8M people
John Barrasso/Michael Enzi (R-WY): 0.19% or 592K people

How is it democratic to allow such a small minority to control our government?