Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction Message Board

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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction

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To: Sully- who wrote (60156)	6/20/2007 12:51:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) of 90947

Another example of the same sort of thing. Taxes a Pleasure? Check the Brain Scan Message 23635270 Note the headline. Indicating that brain scans so people have pleasure or positive feelings from paying taxes. Then if you actually read the article you find out "First, this study did not exactly involve a nationally representative sample of taxpayers. The sample consisted of 19 female students at the University of Oregon." and "And they were not exactly paying taxes as the T-word is understood on the campaign trail." It turns out they weren't just "not exactly paying taxes". They were not paying taxes at all, but rather contributing to charity. "Their experiment was drawn up to remove some of the usual incentives for being charitable like the fear of looking stingy or the prestige of being named in the program of a charity dinner. Each student was given $100 and told that nobody would know how much of it she chose to keep or give away, not even the researchers who enlisted her in the experiment and scanned her brain. Payoffs were recorded on a portable memory drive that the students took to a lab assistant, who then paid the students in cash and mailed donations to charity without knowing who had given what." -- My response at first had other explanations, but than I realized that the headline was false. - “Paying taxes, according to the brain, can bring satisfaction.” If it brings any satisfaction for most people, I suspect its the satisfaction of no longer having the tax bill to pay. As for altruism/charity/being nice. Its really none of those. Your legally compelled to pay taxes. Hmm, reading more I see that the headline is totally misleading, arguably even an outright lie. They tested people giving to charity, not paying taxes. Message 23635918

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