Massachusetts declares early victory in taxing the rich, saying $1.8 billion take from millionaires tax was double expectations

This celebrating is a bit premature. Few people can up-sticks immediately but there will be a gradual and cumulative drip of departures that will mostly leave only the elderly rich in place. Elderly people are not good at handling change so will in many cases opt to pay the tax for the sake of peace.

But elderly people are prone to die. So who will replace them? Just about nobody in all probability. So the "rich" population is likely to shrink to nothing over time -- with a huge loss to Massachustts tax receipts. The Left elite will eventually realise that they have shot themselves in the foot but by then the damage is likely to be irreversible. "Taxachusetts" will once again be a byword for economic stupidity

Taxing millionaires is a contentious issue—but Massachusetts is declaring early victory, with an announcement this week that the state’s tax on its highest earners has yielded $1.8 billion in additional income. With three more months left in the state’s fiscal year, the take is already $800 million more than what officials, including Gov. Maura Healey, planned to spend in additional revenue from the tax, according to the State House News Service.

The money from the so-called fair-share tax has been earmarked to boost transportation and education, including giving every public-school child in the state free lunch, Healey’s office told Fortune last fall, and while the fate of the surplus funds isn’t yet clear, it’s likely to be designated for capital projects related to education and infrastructure. “Those are two areas of immense need,” senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues said on the senate floor, according to the State House News Service.

The tax imposes an additional 4% charge on any income over $1 million a year and was approved by voters in 2022, but immediately drew criticism from opponents who warned it would drive out high earners. Florida and New Hampshire—two states that don’t tax income— have long been favored destinations for Massachusetts residents looking to escape the state’s tax regime, Bloomberg Tax noted. Now, progressive proponents are claiming victory in the wake of the Massachusetts haul.

“Opponents of the Fair Share Amendment claimed that multimillionaires would flee Massachusetts rather than pay the new tax, and they are being proven wrong every day,” Andrew Farnitano, a spokesperson for Raise Up Massachusetts, a group that pushed for the initiative, told the Boston Globe.

“With this money from the ultrarich, we can do even more to improve our public schools and colleges, invest in roads, bridges, and public transit, and start building an economy that works for everyone,” Farnitano continued.

The right-leaning Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance denounced the tax. “Whatever short-term financial benefit the state will receive from the income surtax will be outweighed by the long-term negative effect this tax is having on the state,” spokesperson Paul Craney told the State House News Service. “It’s chasing out high-income earners and making the decision very easy for taxpayers who are regularly impacted by this tax to domicile in more tax-friendly states.”

The Tufts University Center for State Policy Analysis, in January 2022, released a report that found the tax would apply to less than 1% of Massachusetts households in any given year—and that while some high-income residents might move to other states, the number of movers would likely be small.

The news of the first-year success of Massachusetts’s tax is giving fuel to progressives in other states. In neighboring New York, the group Invest in Our New York called for a similar tax, writing that the Massachusetts experience “underscores that taxes on the ultra-wealthy are not only politically feasible, they are a fiscal imperative.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/massachusetts-declares-early-victory-taxing-174251009.html

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What neurodiversity means for psychiatrists and the people they help

Neurodiversity has certainly been kind to me-- JR

By Grace Wade

As a child, I was frequently scolded for zoning out in class, interrupting conversations and losing just about everything I owned. It wasn’t until adulthood, when I was diagnosed with ADHD, that these “bad habits” began to make sense.

The idea that my brain is wired differently is the foundation of neurodiversity, a relatively new framework for understanding neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD and autism. “Neurodiversity reflects an awareness that, across humanity, we have many different ways of perceiving and relating to the world that reflect differences in our brain development and brain function,” says Geraldine Dawson at Duke University in North Carolina.

Instead of viewing these differences as problems to be fixed, a neurodiverse approach aims to embrace them, she says.

That seems clear enough. But the concept of neurodiversity has been a source of debate in recent years, particularly in terms of what it means for psychiatrists and neuroscientists, who have long thought in terms of neurodevelopmental “disorders”, and the people they are seeking to help.

“Some people take it that the neurodiversity paradigm is against the medical paradigm,” says Anita Thapar, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University in the UK. “What I have argued in several papers is that both are useful for different purposes.”

What is neurodiversity?

To start from the beginning, the term “neurodiverse” was first coined in the late 1990s by sociologist Judy Singer, who used it when describing people with autism who had no intellectual impairments but struggled with relating to others or had repetitive behaviours.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234921-500-what-neurodiversity-means-for-psychiatrists-and-the-people-they-help/

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Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology

Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern. In the story, Shermer debunked the myth of the “horror-film curse,” which asserts that bad luck tends to haunt actors who appear in scary movies. (The actors in most horror films survive unscathed, he noted, while bad luck sometimes strikes the casts of non-scary movies as well.) Shermer also wanted to include a serious example: the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

This was the national climate when Laura Helmuth took the helm of Scientific American in April 2020. Helmuth boasted a sterling résumé: a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California–Berkeley and a string of impressive editorial jobs at outlets including Science, National Geographic, and the Washington Post. Taking over a large print and online media operation during the early weeks of the Covid pandemic couldn’t have been easy. On the other hand, those difficult times represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an ambitious science editor. Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic" for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Scientific American’s increasing engagement in politics drew national attention in late 2020, when the magazine, for the first time in its 175-year history, endorsed a presidential candidate. “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people,” the editors wrote. “That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden.” In an e-mail exchange, Scientific American editor-in-chief Helmuth said that the decision to endorse Biden was made unanimously by the magazine’s staff.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unscientific-american

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An Australian govt to explore dropping character references for child sex offenders

Good character is unimportant in a Leftist scale of values

There will be a roundtable on Friday with key justice stakeholders to discuss alternative options to references.

The possible change has been prompted by Your Reference Ain't Relevant campaign, which has been seeking to drop good character references for those convicted of child sexual abuse across the country.

Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury committed to the roundtable in his response to a petition led by the campaign's founder Harrison James.

The roundtable's purpose will be "to identify changes that could be implemented which align with the objectives of sentencing, and address the legitimate concerns raised by those with lived experience".

Alternate options could include revised language or "reviewing court processes to mitigate the risks of re-traumatisation for victim-survivors".

A character reference can be taken into account by a magistrate when determining a sentence for a person convicted of a crime.

The option for a good character reference is not available to some convicted child sex offenders such as teachers and religious leaders but can be used by others, including relatives and family friends.

Mr James will take part in the roundtable. He said the aim of the campaign was to shift focus to the seriousness of the offence rather than the perpetrators apparent good reputation.

"This roundtable signifies a crucial milestone in our campaign's trajectory, and I sincerely hope the legal community, the government and survivors can all come together in solidarity and commit to legislative reform," he said.

"It's time to forge a path forward that ensures no other survivor of child sexual abuse suffers the trauma of having their experiences dismissed and invalidated by irrelevant character references."

Mr Rattenbury's responded to Mr James petition earlier this month.

"I recognise the significant impact that the presentation of 'good character' references during sentencing of child sexual abuse offenders has on victim-survivors," he wrote in the response.

"I agree it is timely to consider what reform could look like in the ACT to make the sentencing process more trauma-informed."

The ACT Bar Association has spoken out against the proposal, saying "evidence of prior pro-social conduct of an offender is relevant to the sentencing exercise".

"Sentencing is a nuanced, multi-factorial exercise. One of the factors to which ACT courts are obliged to have regard, and properly so, is the 'character, antecedents, age and physical or mental condition of the offender', the association said in a statement.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8639192/act-considers-dropping-character-references-for-child-abusers/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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