Over the years I have accumulated a number of examples. Here are some of them. Tax Rates A good deal of the rhetoric in support of proposals for raising taxes on higher incomes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false. Most people in the bottom half of the income distribution pay no federal income tax at all
If we say that all taxes are paid by flesh and blood people, then who pays the corporate income tax? I think the answer is people who have stakes in corporations. I think this fact makes your argument even stronger when you consider how high these tax rates have been in the US. Rich people pay a lot of corporate income taxes even though they don't write the check themselves.
It's more complicated than that. Investors in corporations have to expect as good a return as investors in other assets, so the result may be to increase the prices corporations sell at or decrease the prices, in particular wages, that they pay. It's an interlinked system; changing one element changes others until you get a new equilibrium.
I do not think your analysis of the unhelmeted fatalities is any more accurate than the headline you criticize since it does not take into account the trend in fatalities in the years before and after the change nor (most importantly) the prevalence of unhelmeted bike-riding: if unhelmeted riders are 0.1 % of the total and account for 50% of fatalities the conclusions will be different than the ones we would make were they 50% of the bike riders.
What I wrote was: "I do not know what else changed over the period; it would be interesting so see comparable statistics from states that did not change their laws. But the evidence presented in the article, taken by itself, implies precisely the opposite of what the top level headline suggests."
I did not suggest that additional evidence could not change the conclusion. My point was that if all you had was the evidence reported in the article, its implication was the opposite of what the headline implied.
I see, but my point is that it is not correct to say "the evidence presented implies precisely the opposite of what the top level headline suggests", because the lack of information prevents the evidence presented from implying anything , as it is compatible with all kinds of hypotheses.
In youth I was good at math but bad at formal "logic", tripping over the word implies. Math uses the arrow symbol -> which I was taught to speak as "implies". In fact the usage in math might be more like "includes" or "is a subset of". It IS a claim of truth. In informal speech, "implies" might be synonymous with "suggests" or "tends to show".
So all squares are rectangles. S -> R If a shape is not a rectangle, it can't be a square either. R' -> S' QED. Proof. Speaking, though, you tell me if a shape has four sides the same length and they were set along horizonal and vertical lines, well, that strongly implies we're looking at a square. Doesn't prove it.
I think I found the story about nutrition:
http://web.archive.org/web/20230206155922/https://www.thenewsherald.com/2012/03/14/study-healthy-eating-costs-more/
Thanks. That appears to be it.
If we say that all taxes are paid by flesh and blood people, then who pays the corporate income tax? I think the answer is people who have stakes in corporations. I think this fact makes your argument even stronger when you consider how high these tax rates have been in the US. Rich people pay a lot of corporate income taxes even though they don't write the check themselves.
It's more complicated than that. Investors in corporations have to expect as good a return as investors in other assets, so the result may be to increase the prices corporations sell at or decrease the prices, in particular wages, that they pay. It's an interlinked system; changing one element changes others until you get a new equilibrium.
Re: taxes - https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/lucky-ducky-redux/
I do not think your analysis of the unhelmeted fatalities is any more accurate than the headline you criticize since it does not take into account the trend in fatalities in the years before and after the change nor (most importantly) the prevalence of unhelmeted bike-riding: if unhelmeted riders are 0.1 % of the total and account for 50% of fatalities the conclusions will be different than the ones we would make were they 50% of the bike riders.
What I wrote was: "I do not know what else changed over the period; it would be interesting so see comparable statistics from states that did not change their laws. But the evidence presented in the article, taken by itself, implies precisely the opposite of what the top level headline suggests."
I did not suggest that additional evidence could not change the conclusion. My point was that if all you had was the evidence reported in the article, its implication was the opposite of what the headline implied.
I see, but my point is that it is not correct to say "the evidence presented implies precisely the opposite of what the top level headline suggests", because the lack of information prevents the evidence presented from implying anything , as it is compatible with all kinds of hypotheses.
I am not using "implies" to mean "proves." Evidence very rarely produces a 100% probability for a conclusion.
That information by itself is evidence, would be a reason to raise your estimate of the probability of the conclusion.
In youth I was good at math but bad at formal "logic", tripping over the word implies. Math uses the arrow symbol -> which I was taught to speak as "implies". In fact the usage in math might be more like "includes" or "is a subset of". It IS a claim of truth. In informal speech, "implies" might be synonymous with "suggests" or "tends to show".
So all squares are rectangles. S -> R If a shape is not a rectangle, it can't be a square either. R' -> S' QED. Proof. Speaking, though, you tell me if a shape has four sides the same length and they were set along horizonal and vertical lines, well, that strongly implies we're looking at a square. Doesn't prove it.