Lying

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Little white lies have a tendency to snowball. The more we lie, the more our brains seem to become desensitised to deception.

Tali Sharot at University College London and her team ran an experiment that encouraged volunteers to lie. They were shown jars of pennies, full to varying degrees, and asked to send estimates of how many there were to partners in another room. The partners were shown blurrier images of the jars, so relied on the volunteers’ estimates to guess the number of pennies, in order to win a reward for each of them.

When the volunteers were told they would get a higher personal reward if their partner’s answer were wrong – and that the more inaccurate the answer, the greater the reward would be – they started telling small lies, which escalated. A person who might have started with a lie that earned them £1 may have ended up telling fibs worth £8, for example.

Brain scans showed that the first lie was associated with a burst of activity in the amygdalae, areas involved in emotional responses. But this activity lessened as the lies progressed (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.4426). “This highlights the danger of engaging in small acts of dishonesty,” says Sharot.

My comment: Seems to me to be obvious. However, a small white lie to flatter, for instance, might be excused.
In general, however, lying is corrosive to the soul. Most people realise that as they grow up.

Funding the IRS

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It was only a matter of time before the more extreme elements of the GOP tried to undermine the bipartisan infrastructure.  And right on cue as the bipartisan working group is attempting to finalize the bill’s details, some conservative groups are now demanding that the deal not include increased funding for IRS enforcement. This demand is absolutely ridiculous – here’s why………..

Taken at face value, their claims that spending more money on IRS funding is not fiscally responsible are plainly absurd. Spending money on IRS enforcement brings in significantly more money – it’s a net positive investment. That’s why it’s being used as a pay-for, not as something that has to be paid for.

On a deeper level, being opposed to giving the IRS more money for enforcement is essentially an open endorsement of allowing millionaires and billionaires to commit tax fraud without any consequences. As a recent report from the Treasury Department revealed, wealthy Americans currently get away with an incredible amount of tax evasion every single year in the United States. In 2019 alone, $580 billion that was owed to the IRS was not paid. Over the next ten years, experts predict that this “tax gap,” or the gap between what taxes are owed and what taxes are paid, will reach over $7 trillion, or 15% of all taxes owed. That is a lot of money. And most of it is being kept by rich people.

Just the top 10% of earners account for over 61% of the total tax gap. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because the richer you are, the more complicated your finances become, and the more difficult it is for the IRS to tell if you’re skipping out on paying your fair share. While average people are required to have money withheld from every paycheck, rich investors are supposed to decide for themselves how much to send in and send a check to the IRS every year. Not surprisingly, this leads to a huge amount of abuse.

And because the IRS doesn’t have enough investigators with the necessary expertise to go after rich people with complicated finances, they audit poor people at a higher rate – not because it’s more important to go after them, but because it’s easier.

So how did this happen? We got to this point because conservatives in Congress have systemically and deliberately underfunded the IRS to the point where between 2010 and 2017, it lost 43% of its tax technicians and 44% of its revenue officers. This notion left the IRS with the same amount of enforcement officers as it had in the 1950s when our economy was one-seventh the size it is now. That is unacceptable.

The increased IRS funding is really the only piece of the bipartisan infrastructure bill’s funding package that is worthwhile, so it’s no wonder conservative groups are attacking it. But in the face of their attacks, Congress needs to stand strong on this issue. The U.S. government’s inability to stop tax evasion has been a growing problem for decades, but in its current state, the IRS is almost fully incapable of properly identifying and punishing criminal tax evaders. The system we have very clearly isn’t working – it’s beyond time to fix this problem and put a stop to criminal tax evasion by properly funding the IRS.  (The Patriotic Millionaires)

My comment:  Amen to that!

Joke

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“We’re looking for a Treasurer for the Christmas fund”, said Paddy
“Didn’t you take on a new one last month ?” said Murphy.

“That’s the one we’re looking for”, Paddy replied.

(Relevance to Epicureanism? A sole diet of actual news is so depressing that ataraxia seems a thing of the distant past. We need a smile, at least)

Epicurean belief simply put

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Epicureanism was never meant to be a dry academic philosophy. In fact, it is best kept away from academia, where, as usual with philosophy, long words render it dull, if not incomprehensible. Rather, it is a vital way of living which seeks to free men and women from a life of unhappiness, fear and anxiety. It is a missionary philosophy for the practical-minded with common sense. Let others complicate it if they wish, but I prefer it simple.

The following eight counsels are a basic guide to Epicurean living.
1) Don’t fear God.
2) Don’t worry about death.
3) Don’t fear pain.
4) Live simply.
5) Pursue pleasure wisely.
6) Make friends and be a good friend.
7) Be honest in your business and private life.
8) Avoid fame and political ambition.

I would add:

– Think of others;
– Be polite and considerate to everyone, regardless of race, age, class or gender;
– Try to see the other point of view;
– Meet others half way, if possible.
– Take the smooth and pleasant road, as free from stress and conflict as possible.
– Aim to be moderate in all things.
– Try to laugh and make others laugh. We don’t do it enough
– But don’t be put upon!

Housing in Britain

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To The Times
The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s modest housing measures deserve modest support, but most of this discussion misses the point. Of course supply must be increased, not least to deal with the backlog. The underlying problem, though, is uncontrolled demand. Most household growth comes from immigration, not from the domestic population: in recent years, more than four-fifths of additional households in the UK have been headed by a person born overseas.

Forget the absurdly defective household projections by the Department for Communities and Local Government. For as long as net migration continues at about a quarter of a million per year, Britain will be trapped in a treadmill of housebuilding without limit. (David Coleman, emeritus professor of demography, University of Oxford)

My comment: Britain is a small island and it has beautiful countryside that we all want preserved. At the same time the native population is barely increasing. As it heads off over the 60 million figure the extra people are mostly immigrants. We need them (provided we can integrate them) because they work hard and offer skills we are no longer prepared for now that technical education is so poor and apprenticeships few in number.

But the housing issue is a big problem, and it is right to bring it up. It seems unfair to ask the taxpayer to pay for more expensive housing, but where else will the money come from? I think Epicurus, given similar circumstances, would have advocating cutting military expenditure and putting resources into housing, rather than increase taxes. But then, like now, nobody ever asked him.