Posts tagged United States
Serving the robot community since 2011
If it weren’t for throwing conniption fits, we wouldn’t get any exercise at all.
The Caging of America: Why Do We Lock Up So Many People?
Adam Gopnik writes in The New Yorker about recent books on crime and incarceration in America. Specifically, he looks at the dramatic drop in crime in the last 30 years. What caused that huge decrease and, more importantly, what caused an even steeper decline in crime in New York City?
Although more people than ever are in prison in the United States (the highest incarceration rate in the world), Gopnik says that research by Franklin E. Zimring, presented in his book, “The City That Became Safe,” shows that isn’t what contributed to the decline in crime. The reason was simpler, Zimring writes: “(S)mall acts of social engineering, designed to simply stop crimes from happening, helped stop crime.” And, once those opportunities were eliminated, the cycle of crime was broken.
Gopnik writes:
Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages, [Zimring writes].” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.
It’s a fascinating article that will upend how you view this complex issue.
The [Congressional Budget Office’s] numbers show that the federal tax burden has fallen for all income classes, which itself runs counter to the rhetoric you hear from the usual suspects. But that burden has fallen much more, as a percentage of income, for the wealthy. Partly this reflects big cuts in top income tax rates, but, beyond that, there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.
'Made in China' ranks only 2.7% of U.S. spending
According to this Los Angeles Times story, a study by the San Francisco Federal Reserve found that most of the U.S. economy (88.5 percent) consists of goods and services created in the United States, not in China as is commonly believed.
The main reason is services, which are mostly produced locally. Also groceries and gasoline. Although we import about half of our petroleum, China doesn’t supply much.
