Metrocosm

> The 8 years of Obama doubled a national debt that had taken about 230 years to accumulate. It's obviously bad to have out-of-control debt, but it's worth expressing national debt as % of GDP for two reasons: (a) the GDP of a nation is an engine to be used for repayment and (b) it accounts better for inflation (in periods that the nation is off the gold standard). In that context, the Obama years did not put us back up to the record (WWII). Here are some visualizations (I assume the data is correct, I'm not affiliated with this site): http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/

127 million people, in an advanced industrialised country. I was shocked to see that Japan has a net out-migration: http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/ (Metrocosm -- a/k/a Max Galka -- is an absolutely amazing data resource.)

It'd be interesting to be able to compare America and China through the lens of capitalism; at the moment I don't think China is transparent enough to really come up with anything meaningful. America is a lot less capitalist than it once was [0, 1] total government spending has gone from 10% GDP around the 1930 great depression (so, 9 private dollars for every public dollar) to about 30% post 1950 including State & Local government (2 private dollars per public dollar). I'm not sure how to interpret it, but spending on military also seems to have plummeted since the 60s as a % of spending. The military spending was where the research for things like the internet was done, so that might be meaningful. It seems very reasonable that the impacts of research and tax impacts on savings play out over 20-30 year timeframes (low risk capital investment pays itself back over ~15-20 years which sets up a natural cadence). As the world becomes competitive for the first time since the end of the cold war, issues of how to generate new wealth very rapidly become important. America won't be able to harvest resources from foreign climes (eg, the Middle East) as freely now that China is starting to move beyond its boarders; to say nothing of potential changes in India or other Asian countries. [0] http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/ [1] https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/breakdown_1930USpt_20ps5n

Climate change did this. https://metrocosm.com/timelapse-evolution-of-earths-surface/ Hasn't the planet suffered enough?

I think the problem is more to do with wealth inequality than income inequality, though. http://metrocosm.com/wealth-vs-income-inequality/ https://www.theweek.com/articles/717294/wealth-inequality-even-worse-t… https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0154…

That is counterfactual. Since the 1970s, military spending has decreased as a percentage of government spending and as a percent of GDP, while "for the people" spending - social security, healthcare, etc. - have risen dramatically in both measures. See http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/ and scroll down to the spending breakdown.

Here is the source of the animation (looks much nicer, and interactive) http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

If your view of the Second Amendment runs more towards militias than self defense, MD isn't bad. For long guns, there is no permit required, and either concealed or open carry is allowed without a permit. The ban on "assault style" weapons just means the state police runs a website listing all the semi-auto rifles you can legally buy (which is a lot). You can get your 30-round magazines in Virginia and bring them in with no trouble. Fun fact: MD has more NFA registered weapons per capita than most of flyover country: http://metrocosm.com/map-of-federally-regulated-weapons.

Seriously? No mention of how Barack Obama rejected public funding in 2008 and singlehandedly opened the floodgates on campaign spending? [1] The fact that this isn't directly mentioned anywhere in the article speaks to how far the credibility of the NYT has fallen. [2] [1]: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95957148 [2]: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/politics/20obamacnd.html ---- edit: for a visual on how unprecedented his 2008 spending was, see charts here: http://metrocosm.com/2016-election-spending/ Note the stability in spending starting in 1976 when public funding was introduced.

I agree that regressive taxes (actual govt. issued taxes or implied taxes like smoking in your argument) are a tough case - especially when the people they most affect are sometimes strong supporters of the tax not being stopped. Lottery games are an example of this - the people who play are overwhelmingly poor. This article argues that lottery spending may even be the single largest tax poor families pay [1]. With regard to what you say about there being no replacement income for governments if people stopped smoking cigarettes - I'd say this is only the case if consumption was banned. If it was slowly phased out the pain wouldn't be noticeable. It's like autonomous vehicles - what really matters is the speed of creative destruction. [1] http://metrocosm.com/could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax/

Also used by mapping geeks for 404 pages http://metrocosm.com/asdasdasdasdas/

This is a cool map and there's tons of information in it. It'd be nice to see more details, like the actual numbers instead of just a top 3 counties list. Or if I pause the timeline and hover over a country it'd be neat if it listed that year's exodus. Why do come countries brighten in some years but then dim later on? Edit: ah I see the associated blog post has a little more info, especially about the brightness question. http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

This seems to exclude forced immigration from Africa, which was a large majority until halfway the 19th century. They are taken into account in the same site's visualisation of New Yorkers: http://metrocosm.com/where-new-yorkers-come-from/

The lottery taxes the poor in a very similar way. http://metrocosm.com/could-the-lottery-be-the-largest-tax/

It's discussed at one of the links: http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspective/

The original post from Metrocosm is here: http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of-every-county-in-the-u-s/. It provides a link to the source data from the Economist for the county-level data.

If I was going to write some propaganda to try and whitewash the staggering amount of wealth and power is held by American oligarchs this is what I would do: 1) Write an article about income inequality. Wealth inequality is 100x worse than income inequality - http://metrocosm.com/wealth-vs-income-inequality/ but if you just smoothly transition from talking about economic inequality to income inequality, not only is it not as bad, the reader becomes a much bigger part of it and hence you become less of a part of it. 2) Ignore PPP entirely. If a Slovakian gets paid 5x less than you do in New York and also has 5x cheaper haircuts, you should probably feel a bit guilty about that. 3) Focus on personal responsibility. This is an effective technique. It was used to turn jaywalking into a crime in the early 20th century. It was used to make the litter epidemic of the mid 20th century Not McDonalds Or Coke's Fault. It was used to shift responsibility from Oil supermajor CEOs on to suburban white middle class soccer moms and voila - reduced pressure. Just remember, as the article says: "If you want to reduce global inequality and support poorer people, you do have this opportunity. You can donate some of your money."

Blogspam of http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/