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My cousin Paul in Perth, Australia sent me this:

Our Tax System Explained: Bar Stool EconomicsSuppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a dollar out of the $20,’declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,’ but he got $10!’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a dollar, too.

It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I got’ ‘That’s true!!’

shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.

Professor of Economics

University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.

For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.

Sometimes you just sit back and let other people do the talking. Regarding the current state of affairs in the media, this speaks volumes.Take it away……  By Dominic Ponsford

Former Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard editor Max Hastings has condemned the current culture of multiskilling in journalism - describing it as like making a chef at a restaurant also wait on tables.

Delivering this year’s James Cameron Memorial Lecture at City University in London last night, he also condemned many of the current crop of national newspaper owners for seeming to hate journalists.

He said: “They want the power and influence which possession of a newspaper confers, the access to political leaders and sense of owning a private rifle range, while regarding their journalists as mere trained circus animals who should jump hoops to order.

“They fail to understand that in the media, as everywhere else in life, mutual respect is indispensable between those who pay the bills and those who deliver the goods.”

Praising the Daily Mail-owning Rothermeres as the “most enlightened owners I have ever worked for”, he said: “They believe in journalism. They invest generously in their titles. They give editors extraordinary latitude.”

He added: “The Rothermeres like journalists. Rather than make or break governments, or pursue self-aggrandisement, they simply want to own successful titles. As an industry, we would be in much better shape if there were more like them.

“The proprietors and managements which lack regard for journalists and bound to fail. It is bewildering that so many people aspire to own newspapers, while despising those who produce them.”

Hastings also hit back at politicians who “denounce the deceits of newspapers and journalists”, saying: “We would get it right more often if our rulers deceived us with less frequency.”

He said: “When Britain’s prime minister has just restored to the cabinet that monarch of mendacity Peter Mandelson, it becomes much hard to wax indignant about the excesses of our trade.”

Hastings edited the Telegraph for 11 years from 1985 and then the Evening Standard for five, but he said that he was most proud to having been a reporter and that he was concerned journalists were not being given time to do this job properly in modern newspaper set-ups.

He said: “Many reporters are now required to deliver news to readers and viewers through multiple outlets - podcasts, blogging, TV soundbites. Yet their proper role is surely to gather information and translate it into publishable prose.

“They should be trawling Britain, lunching and dining. One of the most important parts of doing our job is simply to hang around. Ignorant proprietors dismiss this as sloth.

“Yet talking, listening, watching are our lifeblood. If newspaper reporters and, worse still, specialist writers are instead chained to a 24-hour, seven-day treadmill, servicing their organisation’s customers by land sea and air, or rather by print and blog and broadcast, devoting hours of each day to technical delivery functions, it seems as if they were being required to cook dinner in a restaurant’s kitchens, then hasten out in waiter’s aprons to serve it at table.

“I cannot see how on these terms reporters can have time to acquire the information that enables them to have interesting things to say.”

In a speech that was broadly positive about the future of print journalism – and complimentary about many current national newspapers – Hastings said: “Let us banish nostalgia.”He added: “The Daily Express may be dreadful now, but it has been pretty dreadful for the past 40 years. The old Times and Telegraph may have been pillars of respectability, but they were infernally dull. They often published unsceptically the deceits of those in high places, and sometimes deliberately colluded in them.“Although Harry Evans’s Sunday Times produced some of the great scoops of the century, in between there were plenty of longeurs. Quite large parts of the paper were less inspired than their modern counterparts. The same might be said of David English’s Daily Mail.“Today, in their different ways the Financial Times, Guardian, Mail and Evening Standard have never been better. The Sunday Times and Observer feature some of the finest journalists of their generation.”