coryallison-blog

[coryallison-blog]

Can 53% of the Electorate Dictate Tax Rates for the Top 1% of Earners?

James Fallows has an interesting ongoing conversation regarding "the atlas shrugged guy".

Background summary here.

The individual in the second reply makes the argument that it’s unfair for 53% of the California electorate to dictate the tax rates of the top 1% of earners in the state. My initial reaction is to argue that the top 1% of earners have significant influence on their current historically low tax rates. It seems fair for said top 1% top use their influence to lobby for tax codes that disproportionately work to their advantage. If that is the case then is it not logical, and fair, for voters with little political influence to flex their collective will to bring tax rates back to where basic needs can be met. In this instance  the proletariat not is asking for a government stipend so they can sit around and do nothing all day. The people of California want a working education system, something I can, as a parent, identify with.

As an aside, I wonder how many top earners are included in the 53% of the electorate that approved the tax increase.

Next observation, the gentleman pivots from talking specifically about Californian's vote to increase taxes to the standard makers takers argument. He acknowledges as much but yet falls back on the talking points he bemoans e.g., the 1% paying for the 99%. Conveniently, he ignores the fact that the 99% pay taxes as well. In addition, this narrative looses most of it's punch when we talk about taxes at the state level. The 99% aren't getting a free pass, far from it, they're ones dealing with the real world results of an underfunded education system.

Further more, I'm not swayed by the liberal use of free market economist quotes, easy to use and sound impressive but don't hold water when applied to real world scenarios. A simple google search will provide compelling arguments to the contrary. In a perfect world we wouldn't have institutionalized racism, or "makers" that continuously lobby for economic policies that game the system to their benefit. It's interesting to hear individuals from the 1% playing the victim card when we have data like the following graph that depicts the growth in income inequality.

The commenter is certainly entitled to do with his businesses as he pleases, that doesn't mean he is exempt from people thinking that he's pulling a dickish move, just like the original shrugger. When I read articles about CEO's laying people off I wonder how much of it is based on real world market conditions and how much is sour grapes because their candidate didn't win. I'd give bonus points if empirical evidence supporting their decisions could be provided.

[coryallison-blog]

ObjectDataSource TypeName

After going a few rounds with trying to guess the correct value to pass to the TypeName property of an ObjectDataSource I found a handy little trick:

ObjectDataSource.TypeName = this.GetType().AssemblyQualifiedName;

Thank you google.

[coryallison-blog]

Visual Studio Package Load Errors

Visual Studio tip of the day:

When starting Visual Studio 2010 I received a number of error messages stating that various packages did not load correctly. After a couple of minutes with the Google I found a post on the Visual Studio forums that mentioned a command line hook "/ResetSettings".

From the Visual Studio Command prompt running with elevated permissions I ran the following command:

devenv /resetsettings

This reset visual studio back to it's default settings. I lost my font and color settings but the error messages are no longer popping up when I start up the development environment