The coming Congressional debate over fiscal policy is sure to feature a wide array of proposals, some of which would hit certain taxpayers harder than others.
But one idea being floated by Congressional negotiators, as described in an article by The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman on Thursday, is hard to defend from the standpoint of rational public policy making.
Its arithmetic could require that the 300,000th dollar of income was taxed at a rate of about 50 percent – even while the three millionth dollar of income, or the three billionth, was taxed at a lower 35 percent rate instead.
The math behind these calculations is not all that complicated. It’s just a matter of understanding how marginal tax rates work.
Take an American who earns $400,000 a year in taxable income. (This is roughly the threshold at which a taxpayer reaches the top 1 percent of households.)
The top marginal federal income tax rate is now 35 percent, and kicks in at earnings above $388,350.
Someone making $400,000 is above the $388,350 threshold. Does this mean that she’d be taxed at a 35 percent rate on all $400,000 of income, meaning that she’d owe the government $140,000?
Not under current law. Read more…
The last ballots in the presidential election were cast more than two weeks ago. But votes in 37 states, and the District of Columbia, are still being counted, with the results yet to be officially certified.
President Obama’s national margin over Mitt Romney has increased as additional ballots have been added to the tally. According to the terrific spreadsheet maintained by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, Mr. Obama now leads Mr. Romney by 3.3 percentage points nationally, up from 2.5 percentage points in the count just after the election.
Turnout has grown to about 127 million voters, down from roughly 131 million in 2008. The gap could close further as additional ballots are counted. The newly counted ballots have also shifted the relative order of the states.
Immediately after the election, it appeared that Colorado was what we called the “tipping-point state”: the one that gave Mr. Obama his decisive 270th electoral vote once you sort the states in order of most Democratic to least Democratic.
Mr. Obama’s margin in Colorado has expanded to 5.5 percentage points from 4.7 percentage points as more ballots have been counted, however. He now leads there by a wider margin than in Pennsylvania, where his margin is 5.0 percentage points. Neither state has certified its results, so the order could flip again, but if the results hold, then Pennsylvania, not Colorado, will have been the tipping-point state in the election.
Does this suggest that Mr. Romney’s campaign was smart to invest resources in Pennsylvania in the closing days of the campaign? Read more…
I’m traveling for Thanksgiving, so we’ll keep this relatively brief. But I thought this map was worth sharing. It shows how President Obama and Mitt Romney performed on Election Day relative to the FiveThirtyEight forecasts in each state, based on the ballots counted so far.
States colored in blue represent those where Mr. Obama beat his forecast — the deeper the blue color, the larger the margin by which he did so — while those in red are the states where Mr. Romney bested his.
A few things jump out here.
First, there are some pretty clear regional patterns in which each candidate beat his forecast (and, by extension, beat the polls). States where Mr. Obama beat the polls (Oregon, for example) tended to border others where he also did so. The same was true for Mr. Romney.
This suggests that it is a mistake to assume that the potential error in the polls is distributed randomly. Instead, if a candidate beats the polls in one state, he is very likely to also do so in other states that are demographically or geographically similar. (The FiveThirtyEight model assumes that error in the polls may in fact be correlated in just this fashion.) Read more…
Nick Wass/Associated Press Maryland plays in a state with low avidity for college football.Maryland accepted an invitation to join the Big Ten Conference on Monday. Rutgers did the same on Tuesday, expanding the conference’s roster to 14 teams and its footprint to the East Coast.
The new additions would bolster the Big Ten’s reputation for strong academics. Both universities are members of the Association of American Universities, as are all current Big Ten institutions, with the exception of Nebraska.
Their athletic heritages are mixed, however. The Rutgers football team has finished the season ranked in the Associated Press top 25 once in the last 35 years, although it is currently ranked No. 21.
Maryland’s football team has finished the season as a ranked team eight times in the same period. Its basketball team has had more consistent success, winning a national championship in 2002.
But the main rationale for adding the schools seems to be economic: the prospect that they would give the Big Ten, and its cable network, access to the New York and Washington media markets.
On that account, the decision may be questionable. Read more…
For President Obama, re-election proved to be a more nerve-racking ride than his election. Four years ago, aided by an unpopular Republican incumbent, a financial crisis and a wave of enthusiasm, Mr. Obama defeated John McCain by seven percentage points in the national popular vote.
His fight for a second term was more of a slog. The economic recovery was steady but tepid, and while some states are still tallying votes, Mr. Obama leads former Mitt Romney by just under three percentage points nationally.
In 46 states and the District of Columbia, President Obama did worse in 2012 than he did in 2008, winning by less or losing by more. The vote in most counties, too, shifted to the political right.
But separating out the national political environment from more fundamental and potentially longer-lasting political shifts at the state level is harder. Relative to the national popular vote, the picture is muddled: 29 states and the District of Columbia shifted toward Mr. Obama, and 21 states shifted toward the Republican Party. But the partisan lean in most states moved only slightly, and only one state flipped from leaning toward one party to the other. Read more…
Democrats did not have as strong a performance in races for the United States House of Representatives last week as they did in the contests for the Senate and the presidency. Instead, Republicans retained control of the chamber.
But Democrats did regain some ground in the House. Although several races remain uncalled, Democrats would wind up with 201 seats in the House if all races are assigned to the current leader in the vote count – an improvement from the 193 seats Democrats held after the 2010 midterm elections. That would leave Democrats needing to pick up 17 seats to win control of the chamber in 2014.
Although 17 seats is not an extraordinary number, both historical precedent in midterm election years and a deeper examination of this year’s results would argue strongly against Democrats being able to gain that many seats.
There is also reason to suspect that Democrats are unlikely to sustain the sort of losses in the House that they did in 2010. But odds are that the electoral climate in 2014 will be somewhere between neutral and Republican-leaning, rather than favoring Democrats.
Read more…
While President Obama’s lopsided support among Latino and other minority voters has been a focus of postelection analysis, the overwhelming support he received from another growing demographic group — Americans who identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual — has received much less attention.
But the backing Mr. Obama received from gay voters also has a claim on having been decisive. Mitt Romney and Mr. Obama won roughly an equal number of votes among straight voters nationwide, exit polls showed. And, a new study argues, Mr. Romney appears to have won a narrow victory among straight voters in the swing states Ohio and Florida.
Mr. Obama’s more than three-to-one edge in exit polls among the 5 percent of voters who identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual was more than enough to give him the ultimate advantage, according to the study, by Gary J. Gates of the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, in conjunction with Gallup.
Read more in the politics section.
Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press With his speed and good judgment on the bases, Mike Trout increased his contribution to the Angels’ offense.On Thursday, the American League will announce the recipient of its Most Valuable Player award. The winner is likely to be Miguel Cabrera, the Detroit Tigers star who won the league’s triple crown by leading in batting average (.330), home runs (44) and runs batted in (139).
It might seem as if these statistics make Cabrera, the first triple crown winner in either league since 1967, a shoo-in for the M.V.P. But most statistically minded fans would prefer that it go to another player, Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels.
The argument on Trout’s behalf isn’t all that complicated: he provided the greater overall contribution to his team. Trout was a much better defensive player than Cabrera, and a much better base runner. And if Cabrera was the superior hitter, it wasn’t by nearly as much as the triple crown statistics might suggest.
It is an argument enabled by the improved ability to measure different elements of the game – defense, base running, and situational hitting – that were once weak points of statistical analysis.
Read more…
Initial accounts of last Tuesday’s presidential election contemplated what seemed to be a significant decline in turnout from 2008. Those reports may have been premature, at least in part. Some states, particularly those where much balloting is conducted by mail, have yet to finish counting their returns. It is likely that there are several million votes left to be counted in California, for example. Nonetheless, it seems probable that we will see something of a split in the number of people who turned out to vote in 2012.
In many of the states where the campaigns focused most of their attention, more people voted than in 2008. Turnout is likely to have declined in many non-battleground states, however.
In the table below, I’ve compared the number of people who voted in the 2008 presidential race against the number of ballots counted in the 2012 election as of early Monday morning. States highlighted in yellow are battleground states, which I’ve defined as those in which both President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s campaigns spent a material amount on advertising. Read more…
As Americans’ modes of communication change, the techniques that produce the most accurate polls seems to be changing as well. In last Tuesday’s presidential election, a number of polling firms that conduct their surveys online had strong results. Some telephone polls also performed well. But others, especially those that called only landlines or took other methodological shortcuts, performed poorly and showed a more Republican-leaning electorate than the one that actually turned out.
Our method of evaluating pollsters has typically involved looking at all the polls that a firm conducted over the final three weeks of the campaign, rather than its very last poll alone. The reason for this is that some polling firms may engage in “herding” toward the end of the campaign, changing their methods and assumptions such that their results are more in line with those of other polling firms.
There were roughly two dozen polling firms that issued at least five surveys in the final three weeks of the campaign, counting both state and national polls. (Multiple instances of a tracking poll are counted as separate surveys in my analysis, and only likely voter polls are used.)
For each of these polling firms, I have calculated the average error and the average statistical bias in the margin it reported between President Obama and Mitt Romney, as compared against the actual results nationally or in one state. Read more…
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