shoorik

A quick history of tax reform since Reagan

Reagan lowered the individual tax from 50% to 28% while at the same time raised taxes for the most wealthy.

On Oct. 22, 1986, President Reagan signed into law the Tax Reform Act of 1986, one of the most far-reaching reforms of the United States tax system since the adoption of the income tax. The top tax rate on individual income was lowered from 50% to 28%, the lowest it had been since 1916. Tax preferences were eliminated to make up most of the revenue. In an attempt to remain revenue neutral, the act called for a $120 billion increase in business taxation and a corresponding decrease in individual taxation over a five-year period.

Following what seemed to be a yearly tradition of new tax acts that began in 1986, the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1990 was signed into law on Nov. 5, 1990. As with the ‘87, ‘88, and ‘89 acts, the 1990 act, while providing a number of substantive provisions, was small in comparison with the 1986 act. The emphasis of the 1990 act was increased taxes on the wealthy.

On Aug. 10, 1993, President Clinton signed the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1993 into law. The act’s purpose was to reduce by approximately $496 billion the federal deficit that would otherwise accumulate in fiscal years 1994 through 1998. In 1997, Clinton signed another tax act. The act, which cut taxes by $152 billion, included a cut in capital-gains tax for individuals, a $500 per child tax credit, and tax incentives for education.

Read more: History of the Income Tax in the United States — Infoplease.com

Clinton, who was a fiscal conservative, raised the total tax rate to get in front of the deficit but cut taxes on specific taxable items.

Did you know which President grew government spending by the lowest percentage of any other President (inflation adjusted)?

Bill Clinton

Then W came in and cut taxes quite a bit, especially for the top 1%. the problem was not with the tax cuts. the problem was that W started spending money like a drunken sailor and never stopped. He understood the “lower taxes” part of the conservative and pro-economic montra that is well understood by the majority of economists, but, he completely missed the boat on the “cut spending” part that must go along with the “lower taxes”. We have been in a steep economic decline since and Obama is following W’s playbook on spending except but is trying to reverse the tax cuts. It’s funny how Obama refers to his “predecessor” as if W did something different than he is now, in terms of spending.

Bottom line. A country cannot grow it’s economy from government programs. It’s counter intuitive. Taking money from citizens and companies to create jobs for other citizens doesn’t pass the 10th grade economics test.

Those are my thoughts for what they are worth.

Install Ubuntu Unity 2D on Computers with Sucky Graphics

Ubuntu’s fresh-off-the-presses Natty Narwhal 11.04 release comes with the new window manager named Unity. Unity is a modern, sleek user experience and I enjoy it a lot (haters gonna hate).

Problem lies in that Unity (formally known as Unity 3D) demands decent graphics hardware to show you all the transparent, shadowy and smooth-floating deliciousness.

But what if you’re running on a low-end/old computer which has not yet been blessed with a modern graphics adapter, or will never get a chance to (small-factor, etc)? And what if you still crave all the usability components of Unity?

Unity 2D to the rescue. As its name implies, Unity 2D is a slimmed-down version of Unity 3D. It gracefully preserves all the building blocks of Unity 3D, but sacrifices a bit of the eye-candy. To a pragmatist, this is a highly sufficient solution!

So here’s how you do it.

I tried these with Natty 11.04, on a 2001-era Compaq Evo desktop that I picked up certified refurbished for around $100 at a local computer chain. This baby has a 2Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, 1Gig of RAM and a dinky integrated graphics adapter that is just powerful enough to say hello to the monitor. These worked for me with no problem. Your mileage may vary.

On Ubuntu 10.10:

Add additional repository to so that Ubuntu’s installation manager can locate the Unity 2D packages:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:unity-2d-team/unity-2d-daily

Update the listing of known packages (using the new repository above):

sudo apt-get update

Install Unity 2D:

sudo apt-get install unity-2d-default-settings

On Ubuntu 11.04:

Install Unity 2D:

sudo apt-get install unity-2d

Now log out. Select your name, type in your password. WAIT DON’T LOGIN YET! At the bottom of the screen, to the right of the keyboard selection is the window manager selection. You should see option for Unity 2D. Select it. Now login.

Unity goodness should surround you.

[Updated with clarification from whiprush via reddit: Unity 2D is available for installation out of the box in 11.04].

There’s something very peculiar about Consolas font that makes it look gorgeous at odd font sizes, and dopey at even ones.

I really like using event-like method names that react to changes, e.g.: if (widget_changed) OnWidgetChanged(w);

“Enemy of The State” started as a biographical film about Rich Hickey. @clojure

The best thing about .Net 3.5 SP1 wasn’t LINQ but the set of rich extension methods added to IEnumerable

Linewise regex search through file in C#

Problem: search through a file and find all unique instances of a certain regular expression. Show results in an ordered list.

var regexExpression = @"(\w+)";
var file = @"C:\Users\me\file.txt";

var regex = new System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex(regexExpression);

var matches = new List<string>();

using (var sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(file)) {
  string line;
  while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null) {
    for (var match = regex.Match(line); match.Success; match = match.NextMatch()) {
      matches.Add(match.Groups[1].Captures[0].Value);
    }
  }
}

matches.Distinct().OrderBy(m => m).Dump();