cartoons – The Surly Subgroup

By Sam Brunson

A year ago, the National Parks surprised me with a tax name-check. I mean, realistically, there shouldn’t have been anything surprising about encountering a picture of Al Capone at Alcatraz, but I didn’t think I’d see taxes there.

So consider this the second year in a row where the National Parks have surprised me with tax. My family was at Grand Portage National National Monument (which is incredibly cool, btw) learning about the Ojibwe and the North West Company and the thriving fur trade. In one room, there was a display about hatmaking. And, on the wall, was this cartoon:

Continue reading “Tax at the National Parks: Grand Portage Edition” →

By Sam Brunson

A friend sent me a cartoon that’s been going around his Facebook feed. The cartoon’s message amounts, roughly, to: undocumented immigrants are far better-off than legal residents because taxes.

The various assertions the cartoon makes are an amazing collection of racist and wrong. In fact, there’s too much racist, and too much wrong, to address. But it’s worth pointing out that, although the cartoon uses numbers, its numbers are wildly, wildly wrong.

If you want to hate-read the whole thing, you can see it here, but for my purposes, we’re going to look at these two panels: Continue reading “On Marginal and Effective Tax Rates” →