Dumb and Dumber?

 

Epistle to Dippy

Rebelling against society,
Such a tiny speculating whether to be a hip or
Skip along quite merrily.
Through all levels you've been changing
Elevator in the brain hotel
Broken down a-just as well-a
Looking through crystal spectacles,
Ah, I can see I had your fun.
dumb dumb dumb, dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb

So Dippy, are you dumb, or dumb like a fox?

The most convincing lies sound true. Such as “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  You can use simple math to prove this is not true. Let “=” be friendship and “<>” be enmity. Let a be you, b be your enemy, and c be the enemy of your enemy. The enemy of my enemy is his enemy is true, b<>c. My enemy is my enemy, is true, a <>b. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend, a=c, is not true. The enemy of your enemy might be your friend a=c, but they could also be your enemy a<>c.

Similarly tax brackets, which are MARGINAL tax rates are not EFFECTIVE tax rates. A 99% marginal tax rate is not a 99% effective tax rate, any more than acceleration is speed. Prior to Reaganomics in 1979, the highest tax bracket was 70% but the effective tax rate was 37%.  In 1981 after the Reagan tax cuts, the highest marginal tax rate was 50% and the highest effective tax rate was 32%. In 2023, after the most recent Job and Tax Cuts Act, the highest marginal tax rate was reduced to 37% and the effective tax rate was 29%. You can have policy debates on what the marginal tax rate or the effective tax rate effective rate should be, but you should not confuse the two. Was this an example of being dumb, or being dumb like a fox?

A Flat tax rate on income, where the marginal tax rate is always equal to the effective tax rate of income, not households, is implictly assuming that the variance of income in every household is zero, which means that every household has the same income. Sounds rather communistic that way, doesn’t it?

It is true that an absolute has a mean/median/mode which is abosute zero, but this does not mean that an absolute has no variance, σ². In this case determinism is really 0 ± σ and randomness is (x<∞) ± σ. It is NOT determinism is 0 ± 0 and randomness is x ± σ. Making your mean/median/mode equal to zero and your variance zero does not make you an absolute. It only makes the look like you are pretending to be an absolute. The only question is did you unintentionally claim to be an absolute, in which case you could be corrected, or did you intentionally lie about being an absolute and can not be corrected. You can be shown to be lying, but you might still lie.