Today we learn of yet another campus full of disaffected Hillary snowflakes who were triggered by a post-it note suggesting that they should stop whining about the election and just “suck it up, pussies.”  This latest example comes to us from Edgewood College in the ultra-liberal bastion of Madison, Wisconsin via Campus Reform.

Apparently the simple post-it note was determined to be a “hate crime” by the college’s “diversity offices” and students with knowledge of the incident were encouraged to contact campus police.  To our complete shock, a message from Edgewood’s Vice President for Student Development pinned the blame for the “hate crime” on Trump, saying that it is part of a growing trend of “covert micro-aggressions and overt macro-aggressions” that have “taken on new fervor in higher education since our national election.”

  “Over the past week, there have been increasing reports of hateful acts on college and university campuses across the country.  Covert micro-aggressions and overt macro-aggressions appear to have taken on new fervor in higher education since our national election.  The frequency, boldness, and severity with which hateful acts have been occurring has, for many, signaled a new era of intolerance, fear, and mistrust in higher education.”

“A great deal of fear, sadness, and anger among students, faculty, and staff resulted, especially for those that gather in the .  The message was hateful and harmful toward members of our community. It violated every value that this institution considers to be at its core.”

Here is the full letter sent to Edgewood students:

In conclusion, we would simply say:

Every presidential election brings with it a renewed debate on taxes: should tax rates be increased or decreased (which in turn forces economists to break out their textbooks to brush up on their Laffer curve definitions)? Traditionally, the question eventually boils down to one thing: what should the tax treatment of the “rich” be: should the wealthy pay more or less in taxes?

Why the particular focus on the rich? The answer is simple: while those American who declare $500,000 and above in income represent less than 1% of total tax returns, they account for a quarter of taxable income and – more importantly – are responsible for 37% of government revenues collected through individual income taxes.

And with approximately $1.55 trillion in individual income tax expected to be collected in 2016, this means that less than 1% of US taxpayers will be responsible for more than a third, or roughly $575 billion in government revenue, nearly double what corporate income taxes ($300 billion) are expected to bring in.

To any readers surprised by this, here are further details from the St Louis Fed’s Fernando Martin and his recent note “A Closer Look at Federal Taxes”

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The first table provides a snapshot of revenues collected by the U.S. federal government for fiscal year 2016. Total revenue was $3.3 trillion, or roughly 18 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Almost half of this revenue comes from individual income taxes. About one-third comes from payroll taxes, which are collected to fund Social Security, Medicare, and other social insurance benefits. Only 9 percent of total revenue comes from corporate income taxes, while another 9 percent comes from various sources (e.g., excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, and custom duties). These proportions have been stable in recent years.

Given the prominent role individual income taxes play in financing the federal government, this essay inspects these taxes in more detail. The second table breaks down individual income taxes by adjusted gross income brackets and four categories. The first three are relative to total filings: the share of returns; the share of taxable income generated (note that about one-third of returns report zero taxable income); and the share of tax revenue collected. The final category is the implied average tax rate. The data are for fiscal year 2014, the latest available for tax revenue by income levels. Notably, the data do not distinguish between single or joint (filed with a spouse) tax returns.

The differences in individual income tax collection at the extremes of the income distribution are striking. Filers earning less than $50,000 annually account for nearly two-thirds of all tax returns but contribute 7 percent of total revenue. Around half of the filers in this group report zero taxable income4; for those with taxable income, the average income tax rate is 12 percent.5 In contrast, filers making at least $1 million annually account for 0.3 percent of all tax returns and contribute 27 percent of total revenue. Their average tax rate—31 percent—is almost triple that of filers in the lowest income bracket.

Due to the progressive nature of the U.S. income tax code, average tax rates increase up the income ladder. Each income group’s contribution to total revenue, however, depends not only on their tax rate but also on the number of filers in the group and how much income they generate. For example, tax filers earning between $100,000 and $199,999 annually face an average income tax rate of 17 percent but contribute 22 percent of revenue, very close to the proportion contributed by those earning $1 million or more. The reason is that there are many more filers in the former group (12 percent versus 0.3 percent), who together generate about one-quarter of total taxable income (versus 17 percent for the highest earners).

These properties of the income distribution have profound implications for the likely effects of tax reform. For example, tax cuts for the middle class, even minor ones, would imply big declines in revenue; and collecting significantly more revenue from the rich would necessitate large tax hikes.

To illustrate this point, consider a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. Suppose the desire is to cover the deficit by increasing the tax rates of the top income earners. The current deficit estimate for fiscal year 2016 is $590 billion. Income taxes collected from filers earning $500,000 or more annually (the top 1 percent) add up to roughly the same amount as the deficit. The tax rate of this group would need to double to collect enough revenue from the group to cover the deficit. Specifically, their average tax rate would need to increase from 30 percent to around 60 percent. A tax increase of this magnitude, however, might decrease the incentives for high-income earners to work as hard and encourage them to seek new ways to shield their income. Hence, in practice, the tax rate may need to be raised further and even then might not be enough to raise all the additional revenue.

Individual income taxes only partially reveal how the burden of federal taxation is distributed among different income groups. For low-income earners, payroll taxes constitute a significant portion of tax liabilities. The current Social Security and Medicaid withholding rates are 6.20 percent and 1.45 percent, respectively (in addition, employers must also match these contributions). Thus, the average tax rate faced by an individual making less than $50,000 annually and reporting positive taxable income is 12 percent in income taxes plus 7.65 percent; that is, almost 20 percent of income. Since wages contribute less to total income for higher-income earners, payroll taxes play a less significant role at the top. In other words, payroll taxes are regressive. Note, however, that the benefits they provide are progressive, as-high income earners rely more heavily on other sources of funding for retirement and healthcare (e.g., a 401(k) retirement plan).

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Don’t you think it fair and reasonable that anyone accusing me of being a shill for Russian propaganda ought to read my ten books in their entirety and identify the sections that support their slanderous accusation?

I was amused to find my site listed on the now-infamous list of purportedly Russian-controlled propaganda sites cited by The Washington Post. I find it amusing because I invite anyone to search my 3,600-page archive of published material over the past decade (which includes some guest posts and poems) and identify a single pro-Russia or pro-Russian foreign policy entry.

If anything, my perspective is pro-US dollar, pro-liberty, pro-open markets, pro-local control, pro-free-press, pro-innovation, and pro-opportunities to rebuild America’s abandoned, decaying localized economies: in other words, the exact opposite of Russian propaganda.

My “crime” is a simple one: challenging the ruling elite’s narrative. Labeling all dissent “enemy propaganda” is of course the classic first phase of state-sponsored propaganda and the favorite tool of well-paid illiberal apologists for an illiberal regime.

Labeling everyone who dissents or questions the ruling elite’s narrative as tools of an enemy power is classic McCarthy-era witch-hunting, i.e. a broad-brush way of marginalizing and silencing critics with an accusation that is easy to fabricate but difficult to prove.

Such unsupported slander is a classic propaganda technique. It has more in common with Nazi propaganda than with real journalism.

The real useful-idiot shills are the editors and hacks paid by the Washington Post, who are busy penning articles such as “Why the electoral college should choose Hillary Clinton”. Isn’t this fundamentally a call to over-ride the Constitutional framework of the republic’s democracy?

In other words, the ruling elite’s candidate lost, so let’s subvert democracy to “right this terrible wrong” that was wrought by fed-up debt-serfs.

Substitution is a useful technique to reveal propaganda: if Trump had lost by a thin margin, would the The Washington Post publish an article “Why the electoral college should choose Donald Trump”?

Any site suggesting such an outlandish subversion of American democracy would of course by labeled Russian-controlled propaganda by The Washington Post. In other words, it’s OK for the organs of Imperial Propaganda to call for the subversion of the Constitution, but if someone else dares to do so, you know the drill: they’re labeled a tool of Russian propaganda.

Just as a reminder, this is the status quo / ruling elite’s handiwork The Washington Post shills/propagandists support: a status quo of institutionalized privilege, corruption and systemically soaring wealth and income inequality:

The institutionalized impoverishment of non-elite students:

The institutionalized impoverishment of the bottom 99.9%:

The institutionalized impoverishment of everyone below the protected technocrat-insider class of shills, apparatchiks and professionals:

This is what The Washington Post is pushing: a parasitic, predatory, exploitive, ruinously corrupt and venal ruling class and its army of apologists/lackeys/factotums.

The fundamental source of the Post’s hysterical accusations is the ruling elite has lost control of the narrative. This is the source of the mainstream media’s angst-tinged hysteria and frantic efforts to marginalize and discredit any dissenting narratives that undermine or question the power of a corrupted, self-serving ruling elite that has failed the nation and its citizens.

This is why Donald Trump was routinely labeled a Russian shill by the mainstream media during the campaign. Regardless of what you think of Trump or Clinton, what can we say about a supposedly responsible media that so cavalierly spews fact-free accusations of foreign control? This is the height of irresponsible propaganda being passed off as “journalism.”

Free speech implicitly carries the responsibility of the reader/listener/viewer to make a critical assessment of the content, its source and its aim: who benefits if we accept the narrative being pushed?

The delicious irony of The Washington Post‘s hysterical campaign to smear dissenters as tools of Russian propaganda is that it only serves to discredit the Post itself. For my part, I invite you to read all ten of my books and make your own critical assessment of the content and answer these questions:

1. Did you find even a single passage in the thousands of pages that favored Russian policies?

2. Did you find any passages that favored domestic resilience and self-reliance, localized economic development, and the promotion of innovations that favored the many rather than the few?

3. Don’t you think it fair and reasonable that anyone accusing me of being a shill for Russian propaganda ought to read my ten books in their entirety and identify the sections that support their slanderous accusation?

If they can’t support it, then isn’t their accusation the very propaganda they claim to be identifying?

Just as a reminder: here’s my chart of the Ministry of Propaganda (from 2007):

When Does “Managed Perception” Become Reality? (May 1, 2011)

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