US Tax Reform: How about this for a tax plan: cut most people’s taxes by half, eliminate the need to file returns, and provide the Treasury with a better way to reduce the deficit. Sound impossible? It’s not. Here’s how to get it done.

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Keith Libbey & Evan Thomas:

Most Americans spend dozens, if not hundreds, of hours attempting, not always successfully, to do their tax returns. We spend almost $30 billion paying accountants to fill out the complicated forms, and by some estimates we devote $110 billion of our own labor just keeping track of all the necessary records and paperwork. Americans pay about 85 percent of the taxes they owe, better than in most countries, but the shortfall is still a drain on the Treasury (and the rich seem to find a way to avoid taxes legally). Is this costly, demoralizing struggle between the IRS and the rest of us really necessary?



The short answer is no. There is a way to relieve almost all Americans of the annual April 15 nightmare. What’s more, it’s a necessary first step toward a plan to cut the looming federal deficit. The time is right for thoroughgoing tax reform—a true clean slate—that will bring in more revenue while giving the public a greater sense of fairness. The reforms we propose will even allow most people to take home more pay than they do now.



The place to start is to cut almost everyone’s payroll and income taxes by half. Yes, you read that right. Cut most tax rates, which now run from 10 to 39 percent, by half. All individual taxes would be collected through company withholding taxes on compensation (salary, bonus, deferred payments, etc.) and investment income (dividends, interest, capital gains, rents) to individuals. The very rich—those making more than $2 million a year—would still pay a top tax rate of 30 percent on earned income. The rate on investment income would be 15 percent. The result: individuals would not have to file tax returns, most Americans would take home more pay than they do now, the tax base would be broadened, and the AMT—the alternative minimum tax, which sweeps up more taxpayers every year—would be eliminated.



Too good to be true? There’s no free lunch. The revenue lost to the government—roughly half of all personal federal taxes—has to come from someplace else. The best fix is to eliminate all deductions and exemptions for individual taxpayers—all those tax breaks that were intended to promote economic activity or serve worthy social goals but have ended up creating myriad unfair outcomes. It’s true that the wealthiest 1 percent currently pays about 18 percent of all taxes. Still, thanks to clever tax dodges, the top 400 income earners pay an average tax rate of 16.6 percent; megabillionaire Warren Buffett notes that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.

Digital Maoism

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The Economist:

The Economist:

FROM “Wikinomics” to “Cognitive Surplus” to “Crowdsourcing”, there is no shortage of books lauding the “Web 2.0” era and celebrating the online collaboration, interaction and sharing that it makes possible. Today anyone can publish a blog or put a video on YouTube, and thousands of online volunteers can collectively produce an operating system like Linux or an encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Isn’t that great?



No, says Jaron Lanier, a technologist, musician and polymath who is best known for his pioneering work in the field of virtual reality. His book, “You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto”, published earlier this year, is a provocative attack on many of the internet’s sacred cows. Mr Lanier lays into the Web 2.0 culture, arguing that what passes for creativity today is really just endlessly rehashed content and that the “fake friendship” of social networks “is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers”. For Mr Lanier there is no wisdom of crowds, only a cruel mob. “Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups may seem trivial and harmless,” he writes, “but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned personal interaction.”



If this criticism of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia had come from an outsider—a dyed-in-the-wool technophobe—then nobody would have paid much attention. But Mr Lanier’s denunciation of internet groupthink as “digital Maoism” carries more weight because of his career at technology’s cutting edge.

The enduring solitude of combat vets

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Retired Army Special Forces Sgt. Maj. Alan Farrell

Retired Army Special Forces Sgt. Maj. Alan Farrell is one of the more interesting people in this country nowadays, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War who teaches French at VMI, reviews films and writes poetry. Just your typical sergeant major/brigadier general with a Ph.D. in French and a fistful of other degrees.


This is a speech that he gave to vets at the Harvard Business School last Veterans’ Day. I know it is long but a lot of you can’t go outside anyway because of the hurricane:


Big Brother Google

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William Gibson

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.
Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, imminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

Relocated Designer Labels

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Henny Sender and Vanessa Friedman
:

Just weeks after Mr Obama was inaugurated wearing a Hickey Freeman suit, HMX, the Chicago-based owner of that brand as well as Hart Schaffner Marx among others, filed for bankruptcy protection. After an auction in August last year, Mumbai-based SKNL became the latest Asian group to buy a collection of premier western fashion brands.
In doing so, it joined Megha Mittal, of the Indian Mittal steel dynasty, who last year bought the German luxury brand Escada; Li & Fung of Hong Kong, which two years ago snapped up Hardy Amies, couturier to Britain’s royal family; and Hong Kong-based S.C. Fang & Sons, which bought Pringle of Scotland in 2000.
From individual consumers of luxury goods, the Chinese and Indians have become consumers of luxury companies, in a shift that has far-reaching implications for the $80bn (€63bn, £52bn) a year industry. Many of the recent acquisitions have been driven by a wish to raise production standards in Asia and, in the long term, change a tenet of the luxury industry: the importance of production in “country of origin”. The notion that to merit its price tag, a luxury item must be made in the country where it is designed and where its label was born is on the wane.

Protecting your daily in-home activity information from a wireless snooping attack

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Vijay Srinivasan, John Stankovic, and Kamin Whitehouse via Bruce Schneier:

Abstract: In this paper, we first present a new privacy leak in residential wireless ubiquitous computing systems, and then we propose guidelines for designing future systems to prevent this problem. We show that we can observe private activities in the home such as cooking, showering, toileting, and sleeping by eavesdropping on the wireless transmissions of sensors in a home, even when all of the transmissions are encrypted. We call this the Fingerprint and Timing-based Snooping (FATS) attack. This attack can already be carried out on millions of homes today, and may become more important as ubiquitous computing environments such as smart homes and assisted living facilities become more prevalent. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the FATS attack on eight different homes containing wireless sensors. We also propose and evaluate a set of privacy preserving design guidelines for future wireless ubiquitous systems and show how these guidelines can be used in a hybrid fashion to prevent against the FATS attack with low implementation costs.

The group was able to infer surprisingly detailed activity information about the residents, including when they were home or away, when they were awake or sleeping, and when they were performing activities such as showering or cooking. They were able to infer all this without any knowledge of the location, semantics, or source identifier of the wireless sensors, while assuming perfect encryption of the data and source identifiers.