Facebook Twitter Linkedin YouTube RSS
Close

Is US Tax Policy Really Progressive?

Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Originally published at Unrhetorical.

An article in this week’s issue of The Economist compared tax policies across a number of countries. Specifically, the article looked at the way countries’ tax revenues were sourced from income, consumption, and property taxes.

Apparently, the US is the only industrial country without a VAT (value added tax) on products. The Economist claims this is an extremely efficient tax for generating revenues without deterring jobs; however, the burden “falls disproportionately on poorer people who spend a higher share of their income than richer folk.” As a result, The Economist stated:

Thanks to its reliance on income taxes, America—by some measures—has the most progressive tax system in the OECD.

I’m not entirely familiar with the economics of this discussion but I was definitely surprised by the statement. I knew that US income tax is progressive, but I never think of the US as having a generally progressive tax policy. I imagine my biases are based on comparing welfare policies instead, which would likely blind most people to this idea.

A Brief Overview of U.S. Public Policy on OER

Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://publius.cc/brief_overview_us_public_policy_oer_californias _community_colleges_obama_ad

Excerpt

“Criticism of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s initiative often takes issue with his money saving logic for deficit-laden California. Arguably, digital materials require a personal computer available to every student, an e-Book reader like Amazon’s Kindle, or mass printing of each reading assignment by the schools themselves. In a recent NY Times article, Tim Ward, an assistant superintendent in California, says his school district cannot afford any of those options.

“Additionally, what Schwarzenegger seems to not have captured is that OER is a reaction to the move of proprietary, analog educational materials management onto the network. OER encourages and enables the open production, sharing of, and access to educational content and resources. This alone is a valuable societal good, increasing the value of investments made in education. But OER creates the opportunity for a more fundamental and transformative change: the move from passive consumption of educational resources to the formal engagement of educators and learners in the creative process of education content development itself. Thus, the core benefits of OER should probably not be conflated with cutting the costs of materials.”

Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter

Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://www.webecologyproject.org/2009/09/afghanistan-and-its-election-on-twitter-the-macro-picture/

Summary

  • 111,741 tweets about Afghanistan and its presidential election posted between August 11, 2009 and September 9, 2009
  • 11,255 tweets on August 20, 2009, the day of the election
  • 29,642 users talked about Afghanistan in our dataset
  • Top 10% of tweeters contributed 65% of tweets (same as Iran Election)
  • Number of retweets for a user was not correlated to their tweeting volume (same as Iran Election)
  • 483 hashtags were used at least 3 times
  • No single, dominant hashtag (differs from Iran Election)
  • 3 most used hashtags: #Afghan09, #Afghanistan, and #AfghanElection

Web Ecology Project Twitter Scraper and Database Schema

Erhardt Graeff

Re-wrote Ruby Twitter scraper to be more efficient and designed and implemented a normalized database schema for storing tweets on Web Ecology Project’s server.

Revision History

Original Twitter scraper prototype was coded in perl by Ethan Zuckerman (mentioned in a blog post on Apr 13, 2009). The script used Twitter’s URL-based API (since changed) to scrape tweets from a simple search query on a particular term like a hashtag. The script was ported to Ruby by Web Ecology Project member Dave Fisher, who also set up the initial database.

I re-wrote Dave’s code to make the scraper more efficient in how it handled the initial scraping of tweets and in writing to the database. I also designed a database schema for the tweets which organized the various metadata connected to each tweet in specific tables and columns that could be indexed for faster and easier queries across Web Ecology Project’s growing dataset.

Use

My code was used to collect the tweets used in two studies I co-authored, Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters and Afghanistan and its Election on Twitter, and in another study authored by my Web Ecology Project colleagues, The Influentials.