You can now flag a discriminatory name

Salamanizer Ski wrote:

Because that’s exactly what you said. Tax 80% of every dollar someone makes over 100,000 dollars. I know how marginal tax rates work (10% 12% 24% etc.) but I don’t think you know how a prosperous and stable economy is produced. Following that idiot Bernie logic doesn’t create wealth, it only drains it until eventually you run out of other people’s money. 

dude said 80% over 100k would leave him with 20. so no, you don’t know how they work. if the rate up to 100k was 0 he’d have.... 100k!

our progressive tax code made the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen and the top marginal rate used to be 80%. It is actually people who can’t grasp the principles of margins (or are exploiting those that don’t) that are killing our system and leaving the super rich to feast on the carcass.

it’s not just you, it’s lots of hyperbole coming from right wing elected politicians too. take the ‘death tax’, only a couple thousand families pay into a year because it only pertains to paying out what, sums more than 20M to an individual?

And i get to hear rush limbaugh and mark levin bemoaning it when it doesn’t even effect .0000001 of their listeners.

the highest bracket where i am now in canada is 50% over 85k, i still see a lot of ferrari’s and lambos in the nice neighborhoods and everyone has healthcare.

so all i’m saying is have good faith conversations, don’t say someone wants to be a venezuelan or that dems are nazis if they think things could be improved by not just giving the rich needless tax cuts for the hereafter.

FrankPS wrote:Our tax code made us a prosperous nation? Ha ha. That's a good one.
Our freedom, innovation, hard-working people and free market made us prosperous.

Nice try. Thanks for playing. 

Mark E Dixon:

In fairness to petzl, from 1917-1980 or so, the top marginal tax rate usually ranged from 70-91%. 

Overall, this was certainly a period rapidly rising prosperity shared across the income distribution.Of course correlation is not causation...but it does make you wonder.

POST LIMIT:

The tax code was also structured in a way that promoted research i.e. innovation. So at the same time you had big government investment in infrastructure, space, auto tech, whatever next big thing, you also had the private sector doing the same at places like (in my home state) Kodak, IBM, or Texas Instruments, Silicon Valley, etc.

Now there is no incentive for that stuff, so the tax revenue we used to have goes to stock buybacks instead... to basically no one's benefit.
And a lot of the stuff we think we're good at is stuff like software, which is pretty easy to duplicate or steal.

petzl logic wrote: our progressive tax code made the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen 

Our tax code made us a prosperous nation? Ha ha. That's a good one.

Our freedom, innovation, hard-working people and free market made us prosperous.

Nice try. Thanks for playing.

Even before all this "wokefullness" movement began I didn't post any of my FAs. Does that make me racist now? I think my most offensive route names are as follows, "fight starter" "the instigator" and "dogs of war". They're all around a route that was already established called "peacemaker" so I just played off that I'm not very original.

FrankPS wrote:

Our tax code made us a prosperous nation? Ha ha. That's a good one.

Our freedom, innovation, hard-working people and free market made us prosperous.

Nice try. Thanks for playing.

In fairness to petzl, from 1917-1980 or so, the top marginal tax rate usually ranged from 70-91%. 

Overall, this was certainly a period rapidly rising prosperity shared across the income distribution.

Of course correlation is not causation...but it does make you wonder.

RDA wrote:

  Exactly my point-- Sumners guide opened up countless climbs for those climbing in the mid to late 70s.   It was a treasure trove of areas.  I was THANKFUL for his efforts.  My guide is still the only one to Woodfords canyon and many other areas that climbers enjoy to this day.  Is been copied and pasted here in this site as well.   Did you know there is well over 300 Woodfords routes that likely will never be published ?   That guide was close to being done- and I had written the intro for it, but it was shelved for the attitudes prevalent today.  Areas in Nevada will remain a mystery that contain some of the best climbing there is..   And picture yourself going out there and after a lengthy and difficult vehicular and foot approach-- you put in hard work getting up a line only to find fixed pieces dangling from the route.  Sort of a "youve been punked" feeling I assure you lol!   Alvin McLane did that to us enough that I know of where I speak.  

Yet you will probably be all pissed off when somebody else comes along and writes a guide with the information they have, makes up names for "unknowns" or freak out because somebody ran over your route not knowing it was previously done. I do understand your frustration though, I just think going turtle is short sighted.

RDA wrote: You know what this type of bullshyt has led too?   NO guides being done.   I can testify for a fact that there are hundreds of routes done in two  states that will NEVER be in guide books because of the shitty little attitudes of newer climbers entering the sport- playing the victim cards where there is no crime.  The bitching whining and rumor bullshyt that guide writers have to put up with has become such a "new normal" that the have said "Screw that" .   What is ridiculous is at the same time, the same bitching and whining climbers bawl over the fact that the "new guides" haven't come out and that they feel "cheated"..   Two former guide writers , Rick Sumner and myself  and others have been involved in doing many fa's in unknown areas and they will never be in a written guide due to the changing attitudes of young climbers.  In another area that has gained popularity, a new guide with 350 more routes wont be published.    And that is a loss for everyone- and the endeavor of climbing itself.   This very thread "now you can flag a discriminatory name"  is just another nail in the coffin for guides.  The "woke" ( absurd word) generation is killing itself- just like wishing socialism does.  We live in the TWILIGHT ZONE  where up is down, and wrong is right.  

Hold up - you're saying that there are people who put up loads of routes, write whole guide books, but then don't publish them because they don't want people to see what they named the routes? And that those people are in the right, and everyone else is killing their own generation?

Just wanted to clarify

You can choose to be offended if you want. Maybe by a route name that's off color but not discriminatory. Or maybe you can feel offended you have to "put up with" people calling out discrimination. Or maybe you can grow up and not be offended by every little thing and also do your part to help prevent discrimination.

Salamanizer Ski wrote:

Because that’s exactly what you said. Tax 80% of every dollar someone makes over 100,000 dollars. I know how marginal tax rates work (10% 12% 24% etc.) but I don’t think you know how a prosperous and stable economy is produced. Following that idiot Bernie logic doesn’t create wealth, it only drains it until eventually you run out of other people’s money. 

Precisely-- just ask Venezuela... 

ScoJo wrote:

It does indeed literally quote MP.

Andrew Doumont wrote: I have read many route descriptions in guidebooks literally quoting mountain project though and see guidebook authors active on mountain project.

Where, in the route description, does Weidner quote MP.com?
AND...
Where are these MANY?

Now, of course Weidner was on MP.com for that forum discussion.  He's the one that started that discussion after bolting Archangel.
But this is not MANY and it is not a Route Descritption.
So I fins Andrew's claim to be (0/Many)% true, so far.
It will be wholly true when the numerator approaches or exceeds "many," but at present is 100% unsubstantiated even by the example given, which does not support the claim that was questioned.

I don't think that anybody doubts that authors use MP.com.  
Nor that most people would be able to add much, if not most of the info they put on MP.com without a guidebook.  
IE: Route names, having found the routes, FA parties, etc...

But either a statement is true or it isn't, and Andrew got one wrong & Mark contested it.
It would be a whole lot better to just say 'Well, OK, I misspoke' than to attempt the logical gymnastics put forth here, which almost everyone can see for what they are.

Mark E Dixon wrote:

In fairness to petzl, from 1917-1980 or so, the top marginal tax rate usually ranged from 70-91%. 

And almost nobody paid it on almost no money, so that's a bit or a red herring, don't you think?

Not sure I follow your argument Tony.

My point is simply that perhaps the era of greatest growth in the US economy was also a period of high marginal tax rates.

Theoretically that should not be so.
Perhaps growth would have been even higher with lower rates.

Regardless, I try to keep an open mind on all this, as I doubt trained economists really understand as much as they think and I’m definitely not even a trained economist!

Andrew Doumont wrote:

I think the point is that even if the top marginal tax rate was 91% but it was on income over 1 billion dollars (random high number), not many people probably paid it

Btw Tony and Mark, I will concede that the quote wasn’t a great example of what I claimed. But I was more interested the whole time in my original claim (which was disputed) that GB authors probably rely on MP to some degree. Which was my point two comments before the comment Mark responded to. Hope to leave this line of conversation to previous pages though and continue bastardizing economics

Actually, the whole tax thing is kind of interesting.

Apparently the marginal tax rate of 91% (during the 1950s) applied to single taxpayers income over $200,000 (1.7 million in today's dollars.)
Paid by a small percentage (10,000 total people iirc)
Looking at the total tax paid, the top 1% then paid something like 42% of their income and in 2014 the 1% paid 36.4%.
The top 0.1 and 0.01% went from 50.6% to 39.8% and from 55.3% to 40.8%.
Probably totally biased reference

Anyway, as I understand it, increasing the taxes on the rich and very rich would not be enough to fund a Scandinavian style system in the US, but would require raising taxes on the middle class also.

Which would be ok by me.
But since my ability to influence tax policy is nil, my opinion doesn't really matter.

As for guidebook authors- they should definitely access all the information available, and I'm sure they do.
But afaik, they don't typically (never?) copy route descriptions from MP.
Which is a good thing, since MP descriptions are frequently worth exactly what you pay for them.

Mark E Dixon wrote: Not sure I follow your argument Tony.
My point is simply that perhaps the era of greatest growth in the US economy was also a period of high marginal tax rates.
Theoretically that should not be so.  Perhaps growth would have been even higher with lower rates.
Regardless, I try to keep an open mind on all this, as I doubt trained economists really understand as much as they think and I’m definitely not even a trained economist!

My point was that if it didn't really cost many people anything, or generate significant revenue, then it can't really have caused anything to happen.
Shoot, take $1B from each of them a year and you can't even cover the deficit with that.  
This was along your line of admission that correlation is not causation.

So that's just the thing.  If we "get richy" and go punishing billionaires... Let's say we take ALL of their income, we still don't have enough to do anything with it, really.
But it makes a lot of people feel good to have something punitive happen to the 'haves.'

I ask the question about wealth disparity, as if that causes all the problems... Let's say we just take all of the top X% (OK, how about 25%?) and export them and their $?
We could send them all to Canada.  Would we fix everything?  No, of course not.  Nothing fixed.

Andrew Doumont wrote:

Btw Tony and Mark, I will concede that the quote wasn’t a great example of what I claimed. But I was more interested the whole time in my original claim (which was disputed) that GB authors probably rely on MP to some degree. Which was my point two comments before the comment Mark responded to. Hope to leave this line of conversation to previous pages though and continue bastardizing economics

Yep, there is no  doubt that GB authors use MP.com as a resource.  I had that discussion with Ben and Myke 20+ years ago when we were talking about why 'climbing boulder.com' should be replicated for Moab, Vegas, etc...   

Mark E Dixon wrote: Not sure I follow your argument Tony.

My point is simply that perhaps the era of greatest growth in the US economy was also a period of high marginal tax rates.

Theoretically that should not be so.
Perhaps growth would have been even higher with lower rates.

Regardless, I try to keep an open mind on all this, as I doubt trained economists really understand as much as they think and I’m definitely not even a trained economist!

What was the tax revenue in that tax bracket during that time? Setting a high marginal tax rate is a good way to incentivize people to take their compensation in other forms. Jeff Bezos's salaray is only $82k (and that's rounding up). He's barely above the income level that gets a refund every year.

People like to lambaste Reagan's economic policies, but even though he cut the tax rate for the highest earners, revenue for that tax bracket actually went up, not down. The same is true of the the George W. Bush tax cuts. Even though the rich got more of a "break" in monetary terms (they got a higher dollar amount in their check), they ended up paying a higher proportion of income taxes when all was said and done.

Tony B wrote:

My point was that if it didn't really cost many people anything, or generate significant revenue, then it can't really have caused anything to happen.
Shoot, take $1B from each of them a year and you can't even cover the deficit with that.  
This was along your line of admission that correlation is not causation.

So that's just the thing.  If we "get richy" and go punishing billionaires... Let's say we take ALL of their income, we still don't have enough to do anything with it, really.
But it makes a lot of people feel good to have something punitive happen to the 'haves.'

I ask the question about wealth disparity, as if that causes all the problems... Let's say we just take all of the top X% (OK, how about 25%?) and export them and their $?
We could send them all to Canada.  Would we fix everything?  No, of course not.  Nothing fixed.

My point is that asking if we should increase taxes on high earners doesn't make us nazis or venezuela by a bunch of people who can't find that country on a map. And regarding your chart (from 1979), well as Twain said, "there are lies, damn lies, and statistics." Your chart showing the effective tax of the 1% makes it easy to bury if 1/10th of those pay more or much more since it is the average rate of all the high earners. Now we have a .1 and a .01 that are far out of line of historical means. In 1950 a CEO made 20 times the salary of an average worker. Last year it fell to.... 271 times. So was America not great then? I mean it wasn't for civil rights, but maybe the tax policy was so it strikes me as a bad faith argument that everyone is out to "get richy" when really what lots of people want is a return to the norms. 

Like with the estate tax, if 2000 people pay 25M on it.... it's a shit ton of money. Does it fix all of our problems? No. Is it an excuse to spend money wherever we want, and more of it? Fuck no. 

And feel free to read all you want about the Bush tax cuts. Heritage Center (highly biased, obviously, since they helped write the cuts) says they worked. And everyone else disagrees. But was it prudent to cut taxes and put two wars on the credit card? Was it prudent for Trump to cut taxes when the economy was on fire and there was no need (just before an unexpected downturn decimated everything)? Of course not. Which is why we need sane policies for society and to encourage R&D to avoid future icebergs (other technologically competitive countries, climate change, etc).

The fear that we would send everyone to another country is ridiculous. Especially Canada. These guys love taxes.

Tony B wrote:

And almost nobody paid it on almost no money, so that's a bit or a red herring, don't you think?

High marginal tax rates were intended to cap wages, not to raise revenue. The postwar economy was oriented towards cultivating competition (and in the process generating relative equality) via antitrust enforcement, limited intellectual property and patent rights, progressive taxation, price controls (especially labor, but also for commodities in cases, like farming, where doing so preserved competition), and public goods and services. This was the "New Deal consensus" reached after the failure of the monopolist laissez faire era, which reigned from roughly the end of the depression of the 1870s (which incidentally, effectively crushed Reconstruction) to the Great Depression in the 1930s, and ended with the backlash to the Civil Rights movement that led to the neoliberal era of the late-1970s to the present.

To point out one more thing about the modern United States, although our tax rates are low (and in effective rates, quite flat), our compulsory rates are extremely high as a percentage of income. What you don't pay to the government you end up paying to some monopolistic industry, mostly healthcare, education, and housing. (Healthcare is universally expensive here and education mostly so, but housing is a bit more varied; if you're willing and able to move out of the Big Blue cities you can live cheaply.) If literally all we did was bring down healthcare and education costs, I think many of the other seemingly-intractable problems in American life would largely cease to matter.

I just hope the red-ball for thought crimes never becomes a thing..because I'm going down then.

I have thought crimes like every 20 or 30 minutes.

I'm interested in hearing thoughts on this from old climbers who gave FAs inappropriate names when much younger. With a few decades of growing up what do you think of those juvenile choices? Im not bashing on anyone with this question,  it's just that I remember being an idiot as a young man. The difference was I sucked too much to put up FAs and never had the opportunity to make a lasting inappropriate statement. Is the belief that once uttered the name is set in stone? I understand this is a subset of FAers but I'm curious as to their thoughts.

Jesse Morehouse wrote: I'm interested in hearing thoughts on this from old climbers who gave FAs inappropriate names when much younger. With a few decades of growing up what do you think of those juvenile choices? Im not bashing on anyone with this question,  it's just that I remember being an idiot as a young man. The difference was I sucked too much to put up FAs and never had the opportunity to make a lasting inappropriate statement. Is the belief that once uttered the name is set in stone? I understand this is a subset of FAers but I'm curious as to their thoughts.

The thing is that many of them were contextual to the time the route went up and document the misogyny or homophobia etc that young men were experiencing. No need to run from your former self if you are very different now and comfortable in your own skin.

As well, the only "inappropriate" route names I can recall by myself or my partners were always self referential or self depreciating ie White Punks on Dope or Way Homo Sperm Burpers or Butthole Climbers etc or specifically intended to insult climbing traditionalists and their grandiose route names...and all of which have more story behind them than you might think but we really don't give a shit what you think (nothing personal). They meant something to us then, and those memories are our own. Sorry.  You don't get to sanitize our past for your own pleasure.

Nick will try, but it will be the ruin of his project.

If you don't like it put up your own routes. Don't climb or document routes here if you don't like the route name. I am quite sure the FA won't mind.

I'm gonna name my next route "Unicorns Shitting Rainbows".