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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (606789)	4/6/2011 4:55:54 PM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 1579980

Gay judge never considered dropping Prop 8 case SAN FRANCISCO \| Wed Apr 6, 2011 4:13pm EDT (Reuters) - The judge who struck down California's gay marriage ban never considered his own homosexuality as a reason to recuse himself from the case, he said on Wednesday. Former U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker, who retired from the bench at the end of February, said it would not be appropriate for any judge's sexual orientation, ethnicity, national origin or gender to stop them from presiding over a case. "That's a very slippery slope," Walker said. The talk to a handful of reporters was Walker's first public comments to reporters about presiding over the lawsuit challenging to Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California. Walker struck down the ban as unconstitutional, and the case is currently on appeal. It was also the first time Walker publicly acknowledged his own sexual orientation. Walker said he has been in a relationship with the man for 10 years. "He is a physician," Walker said. Walker is a Midwesterner, born in 1944 in Watseka, Illinois, about 90 miles south of Chicago. He worked for years at one of San Francisco's top law firms before being nominated to the federal bench in 1989 by George H.W. Bush. He made for an unpredictable jurist, ruling against the government in a widely watched state secrets case. In another matter that has become lore at the San Francisco federal courthouse, Walker sentenced a mail thief to stand outside a post office, carrying a sign with the words: "I stole mail. This is my punishment." Walker served as chief judge in the Northern District of California for six years before retiring in February. He said he has launched his own practice focusing on alternative dispute resolution. (Reporting by Dan Levine, editing by Peter Henderson and Sandra Maler) reuters.com

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (606789)	4/6/2011 5:02:10 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1579980

I kept saying wealthy folks only pay about 20% of AGI and you and friends kept tossing out the marginal brackets. Noting that marginal tax rates are high, and this is a bad thing, is not claiming that the marginal rates paid are the same as the average rate paid. The marginal rate is the tax on the next dollar, and as such exerts a strong effect on decisions about earning that additional dollar. The average rate is also important, a high average rate means the tax creates a high burden. 20 percent average effective rate is a high average rate. Increasing the marginal rate might not increase the average rate or the tax revenue (since it encourages tax avoidance and evasion, and discourages investment and work), so the benefit is rather uncertain (and that's assuming higher federal revenue as a benefit), the harm, the distortion and dead weight loss is not uncertain (even if the exact level of it is unknown).