Random Thoughts

The Onion characterizes Bush's tax policy as follows: One would hope McCain and Obama have better policies. As a "number's guy," I wanted to see real numbers showing how the tax proposals of the presidential candidates really look. Luckily, the Urban-Brooking Tax Policy Center has crunched the numbers and summarized their findings . For the more graphically-inclined, this picture might help better. 2009 ----------- 2012 The bottomline is that Obama's plan clearly favors helping the poor and middle class while McCain's helps the rich a lot more than it does the poor. If an individual's tax burden is a key factor in determining who people vote for, I can't imagine 80+% of the country voting for McCain over Obama. In plain terms, Obama's plan favors 80+% of the population while McCain's fattens the richest 20%. Those who justify McCain's plan using principles of supply-side economics should realize that there are plenty of instances wher

SuSE 9.2 was my first OS I installed on my laptop 3+ years ago within an hour of getting my much-awaited notebook. SuSE 9.3 lasted me for almost a year before Novell's decision to fork a version of SuSE into the community-supported OpenSuSE. Like most SuSE fans, I tolerated the buggy and unstable nature of OpenSuSE for a short while before ditching it for other distros, particularly Ubuntu. Thus, the announcement of the highly anticipated OpenSuSE 11,0 was a very welcome news. Having played around with OpenSuSE 11.0 for the last five days, I am very convinced that SuSE is back to where it used to be -- leading. Here is a brief review. The installation is very easy and smooth. I performed a network install without a hitch from the TDS mirror in Madison, Wisconsin. YaST doesn't break as easily as it used to. At least it hasn't happened yet. Installing software repositories used to be a pain. One would have to look up the info about the repos and enter it manually. Mos

Obama has been accused of being a flip-flopper for his dubious stands on NAFTA, gun control, FISA, and public campaign financing. I for one don't mind the flip-flopping, if you can call it that. Obama has always claimed to be a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Instead of clinging to very liberal positions to please a narrow base of hardcore activists, he has decided to take more practical positions that will appeal to democrats as well as independents and perhaps disgruntled republicans. If he keeps this pragmatic approach, I think he will get a lot done once he is elected president. Pols in Washington will hopefully learn to take on less partisan and more practical approach to their work as well.

I don't care much for politics and the only reason I blog about it is because I like Barack Obama. Today, I found a side of politics that could appeal to a "numbers guy" like myself. Paul Krugman cited the Poole-Rosenthal-McCarty model to determine how liberal or conservative Obama and McCain really are. Given the general perception that Obama is a big city ultra-liberal and that McCain is a centrist republican, a well-thought model was necessary to substantiate/debunk these perceptions. Instead of defining liberalism and conservatism on the basis of a person's stand on abortion, gun rights, gay rights, ... etc, I want to see a comprehensive study of all economic and social values. That's why I love Poole-Rosenthal-McCarty model. I read that Michael Dukakis' (1988) and John Kerry's (2004) lost in their presidential bids mainly because republicans labeled as elite, liberal, unpatriotic and out-of-touch. Apparently such labels really turn off the Am

According to this report from the Department of Transportation , Americans have cut down their driving by 4.3% (11 billion miles) in March 2008 compared to March 2007. I assume the cutback is largely a response to record high gas prices. Many economists assume the demand for gas to be price-inelastic since gas is a necessity and there are few immediate alternatives to the usage of gas. However, in a country like the US where people drive excessively and consume gas with little guilt or cost, there was room for people's consumption of gas to respond to its price. Since the price of gas has gone up by some 70 cents for a gallon from March until June 2008, I assume there is a sustained reduction in the consumption of gas which will continue so long as gas prices keep their upward swing. The fact that gas prices have gone up so much despite a cutback in consumption in the US is a clear indication that the price hikes are independent of supply-demand in the US. It probably has more