The Ari Fleischer tax plan

I'm not in line with his whole rationale, but agree 100 percent with his proposal:

"...we should create a simple income tax system that has no deductions or credits at all. The result would be a progressive, multitiered income tax in which everyone pays."

There will certainly be disagreement about how progressive, but I'll take a system like that any day as opposed to the current mess we have. A system with no credits or deductions would not only be more fair, it would save billions in tax preparation expenses.

Favorite quotes

Everybody and their mother are talking about Joaquin Phoenix's interview at David Letterman. One of my favorite movie quotes is from his character Max California in the movie 8MM:

"When you dance with the Devil, you don't change the Devil. The Devil changes you,"

Great movie, by the way.

Personally I don't care much whether he's acting or not just as long as the man's happy, which by the looks of it he's not:

Remorseless people

Another saddening and bewildering thought on Bernie Madoff and Stewart Parnell, president of Peanut Corporation of America, the man who knowingly sold the tainted peanut butter that killed nine people and sickened many more.

It's not just that they got people thinking how could they do this. It's that they show no signs of remorse. (I guess that answers the question of how could they.) Lives ruined, people killed, it's just part of business.

Don't publicize the address of your opponents

The openness and dynamism of American democracy is incredible. Some of the discussions that go on in this country would not happen anywhere else. Gay marriage, when it was approved in European countries, was passed by the parliament with not nearly as much debate as in the U.S. Here there such a vibrant discussion.

Yesterday, Brad Stone weights in on the eightmaps.com controversy at the New York Times. Eightmaps publicizes the name and location of people who contributed $100 or more to Proposition 8 in California, the one that banned gay marriage in the state in the 2008 election.

It's obviously a form of intimidation. As Brad Stone reports, many people were harassed and threatened because of it. But even if no one were, it is still a "we know who you are and where you live" warning. Or so it feels to the people who see their names on the web site.

I was surprised to learn that the creators of the web site remain anonymous. Talk about cowardice. They think everyone should be subjected to explain their political donations but are afraid of defending their own stance in public. Of course I understand their reluctance, there's a lot of crazy people out there. Which is exactly why the maps they created are so awful.

If only the SEC did their job...

The more we learn about the facts surfacing from the Madoff fraud the more depressing it gets. Yesterday we learned about everyone, especially the celebrities, who lost money in the scheme. The consequences are heartbreaking, such as the news about the investor who committed suicide or the foundations that had to shed jobs and close doors.

The fact that anyone could so be cold as to ruin people's lives like Mr. Madoff is revolting, but the thing that angers me the most is that those who are hired by taxpayers to avoid this very type of fraud had plenty of warning and chose to ignore it. From CNN:

Markopolos began contacting the SEC at the beginning of the decade to warn that Madoff was a fraud. He sent detailed memos, listing dozens of red flags, laying out a road map of instructions for SEC investigators to follow, even listing contacts and phone numbers of Wall Street experts whom he said would confirm his findings. But, Markopolos' whistle-blowing effort got nowhere.

"I gift wrapped and delivered the largest Ponzi scheme in history to them and some how they couldn't be bothered to conduct a thorough and proper investigation [...]"

It's not that nobody saw it coming. Is that the regulators just chose to ignore it. While I don't discount sheer stupidity and incompetence, I wouldn't be surprised if the warnings were ignored deliberately. I hope investigators get to the bottom of this.

PS: The people who put all their money into Madoff's funds were obviously stupid to ignore the cardinal rule about diversifying your investments. They're not to blame for what happened to them, but we all should know better. Just a few years before, workers at Enron lost everything because all their investments were tied to the company. It seems many didn't learn that lesson. Many more will ignore this latest one too.

Shadow photography

Top 10 photos of shadows submitted and chosen by Wired magazine readers. Beautiful.