November 7, 2000 – Brian.Carnell.Com

Time to Call A Truce in the Spanish-American War

One-hundred and two years ago the United States got into a war with Spain. Because telephones were still a luxury item owned largely by the rich at the time, the Congress decided to soak it to the rich and created a special 3 percent excise tax on telephone service that was used to finance the war. Although the war was over pretty quickly, the tax endured and, in fact, is still assessed on every American’s phone bill.

Both Democrats and Republicans had a brilliant idea recently — since we’re no longer at war with the Spanish, why not get rid of the excise tax? Since telephone service is a cheap, almost universal service today, such a plan appealed to even Democrats as the excise tax primarily harms poor people. In fact a study by the Progress and Freedom Foundation claimed that the tax helps price up to 140,000 low and moderate income Americans out of Internet access. I haven’t seen that study and the numbers sound a bit too high, but there is no arguing that the heavy load of taxes in phone bills certainly discourages phone use and Internet use for people in the lower levels of income. The cost of the Spanish War tax alone comes to about $4 billion per year.

Both the Senate and House voted overwhelmingly to get rid of the excise tax. In the House of representatives, 420 members voted to get rid of the tax and in the Senate 97 of 100 Senators agreed it was time for the tax to go. After all there couldn’t possibly be anyone concerned about the Spanish as a military threat could there be?

Of course their could and President Bill Clinton promptly vetoed the measure in retaliation for Republicans opposing another bill that Clinton wants to see passed. That makes a lot of sense — make low income Americans pay more for telephone service because of political disagreements between Clinton and the Congress in the last few months of the Clinton presidency. I guess it’s all about making sure you only benefit the top 1% of politicians rather than average Americans.

Source:

Clinton sustains Spanish-American war tax. Press release, Americans for Tax Reform, October 31, 2000.

Wired on Hackability of Lego Mindstorms

Wired’s Michelle Delio has written a very good summary of people in the Lego community who hacked the source code for the Lego Mindstorms and then created Mindstorms versions of popular computer programming languages such as Java.

Rather than send out cease and desist letters, the Lego folks decided to embrace this move and sales of Mindstorms are going through the roof.

One of the highlights of Delio’s article is she mentions and the article links to the site of 11-year-old Marcus Fischer Mellbin who has built some amazing things out of Legos. I’ve seen lots of cool Lego projects, but he actually built a working kinetoscope out of Legos. The Kinetoscope was Thomas Edison’s first successful crack at a motion picture machine and Mellbin’s Lego version is simply inspired. He’s only 11 but engineering firms should be courting this kid now.

Election Day in the United States

The final Rasmussen poll has Bush 49, Gore 40, Nader 4.
ABC had a feature last night on the candidates you’ve never heard of which claimed Harry Browne was on all 50 state ballots. Sorry, Charlie, he’s not on the ballot in Arizona where L. Neil Smith managed to get himself placed on the Libertarian Party ballot.
How desperate are Democrats? In Milwaukee, Democratic activists were handing out packs of cigarettes to homeless people. On my drive to work I saw a Democratic party activist in the middle of a traffic island with huge signs informng me that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush and that a vote for Bush is a vote for racism.
Time for the celebrity exit watch — if Bush does win today, as it appears very likely he will, I think it is important that we all band together to give Alec Baldwin a fond farewell as he makes good on his promise to leave the country if Republicans capture the White House (that promise alone almost was enough to make me cast my vote for Bush).

Harsh Words for Netscape

In case you haven’t been following its latest fiasco, Netscape is apparently rushing Netscape 6 out the door with a host of problems, including poor support for standards. One of the folks at Slashdot just rips into Netscape on the Slashdot’s frontpage saying,

It seems clear to me that Netscape cares a lot more about shopping tabs and similar deadwood – things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user – than they do about putting out a decent browser. Personally, I’d recommend beta-testing IE 6, since IE not only has won the browser wars, it’s clearly a better browser – and will remain so.

Ouch. But is IE 6 really going to be any better? As ZDNet notes, IE 6 is going to be loaded with the same sort of extraneous options,

Version 6.0, according to ActiveWin.com and WinInformant.com, will get a more digital-media facelift. Microsoft will add Explorer toolbars that will allow users to work more easily with digital images, music, and video clips, the sites said.

Yeah the other day I was thinking to myself, “Gees, I wish I had another button on IE that woudl let me play video clips easily.” Not.

Plus it’s still an open question as to whether or not Microsoft is finally going to get around to supporting standards consistently in its browser. ZDNet claims that, “And Microsoft will almost certainly add the new dynamic HTML and cascading-style-sheet technologies to IE6 that it unveiled last week as part of its service pack 1 update to Version 5.5,” but I won’t believe it until I see it.

Major Advance in Treating Injured Nerve Cells

Medical research teams working at Boston’s Children Hospital and Harvard University will present reports at the upcoming Society of Neuroscience meeting that they have made a major advancement in the treatment of damaged nerve cells. Using a protein called inosine, the researchers were able to cause nerve cells in rats to sprout new axons which met and formed synapses to send messages to each other.

The traditional problem with damaged nerve cells is that such cells generally don’t regenerate. This is generally considered a “it’s not a bug it’s a feature” kind of adaptation — the last thing you want, after all, is out of control growth of cells in the central nervous system. Unfortunately, that also has made it difficult to repair spinal cord injuries or loss of brain cells from stroke because the cells don’t regrow.

Using inosine, which occurs naturally at low levels in the brain the researchers were able to flip the “master switch” that regulates repair of nerve cells. “The big surprise,” Dr. Larry Benowitz told The BBC, “is that inosine regulates all the other genes involved in nerve repair. It activates the ‘master switch’ if you like.”

The possibilities for this technology are amazing. Boston Life Sciences, which sponsored the research, is working to develop inosine for use in stroke victims and could have potential applications in treat a variety of brain injuries and degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as for treating spinal cord injuries that lead to paralysis. “It is a very exciting and fast-moving field,” Benowitz said. “In five to ten years we may have an effective treatment that restores a lot of function after major spinal injury, not 100% but a lot better than anything we currently have.”

Especially since the information gleaned from the way inosine works in rats is giving researchers important clues about the underlying genes involved in nervous system functioning and repair. Benowitz said that his team believes it has identified the gene responsible for repair and future research will clone the gene and dig down further into how it works.

It is amazing how quickly medical knowledge advances thanks to animal researcher.

Source:

‘Key discovery’ in nerve repair. David Whitehouse, The BBC, November 1, 2000.

Researchers say find key nerve injury protein. Reuters, November 1, 2000.

Are High Marginal Taxe Rates a Feminist Issue?

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore has railed against a proposal by Republican candidate George W. Bush to reduce taxes saying it would benefit only the top one percent of income earners. Writing in the New York Times, however, Virginia Postrel points out that high marginal tax rates at higher income levels encourage married professional women to reduce the number of hours they work, which has strong affects their future promotion potential, or to quit the workforce altogether.

Feminists typically complain that there aren’t enough women at the upper echelons of corporations. While women are more and more represented at mid-level management, they claim, there are not enough women breaking through the “glass ceiling” into executive level positions. As Postrel points out, though, married professional women get screwed by the high marginal taxes if they get promoted too high. Since women are more likely than men to consider not working outside the home, if a woman’s income pushes her family’s income into a higher tax break, there is an economic incentive there not to work.

But does this actually make a difference in the real world? Yes. Postrel cites a 1995 study by University of California at Berkeley economist Nada Eissa on the Tax Reform Act of 1986 which, among other things, reduced the highest tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. The result, the percentage of married women in the highest tax bracket who worked outside the home jumped from 46 percent to 55 percent, and those who had jobs increased the number of hours they worked by 13 percent. Looking at women in the 75th percentile, who didn’t receive as dramatic a tax cut, the percentage of married women who worked increased by only 7 percent and the number of hours they worked increased by only 9 percent. As Eissa told Postrel, “There is a relationship between taxes and labor-force participation.”

Eissa found similar results when looking at the effects of the earned income tax credit which provides an economic incentive for poor families not too raise their incomes to high since it applies a de facto 21 percent marginal tax rate on all income above about $12,000 for a family of four. Women in that situation were 5 percent less likely to work outside the home if they were in a position where working would bump their family income above that level.

As Postrel notes, however, this is a topic that neither liberal or conservatives want to raise,

Democrats don’t want to admit that the soak-the-rich taxation wallops working wives, lest they split feminists and redistributionists. And Republicans don’t want to admit that cutting taxes will lead more married women to get jobs, lest they split economic libertarians and social conservatives. So everyone stays mum.

But the empirical evidence is pretty clear. Tax rates are a feminist issue.

Personally I tend to think the liberal feminists are the biggest hypocrites here, as they seem committed to maintaining that a professional woman has the right to decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy but then is too stupid or too mean spirited to control her own finances, but instead must hand much of it over to the government which presumably knows better than she does. Much of the pro-choice movement has little use for truly giving women (much less men) the ability to make wide ranges of choices over their lives, turning incredibly statist once anything besides the narrow issue of abortion is put on the table.

Source:

Tax System Discourages Married Women from Working. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times, November 2, 2000.