Delete comment from: Elements Of Power
My two points were that
1) the data/argumentation Volokh used did not support the identification of some grand shift in economic activity that was shorting the taxman and
2) the personal spending portion and the government spending portion both show very linear trends over the 1992-2008 time frame (and as there are only two data points for trans-state economic activities you can't really correlate those activities to anything else to mean anything much less an 'accurate' trendline).
We could torture the data to death, but as we are dealing with rather gross summaries of data, it would only be torture and not extraction of any deeper meaning.
Within the years examined, entire industries arose and fell, shifts to services and some manufacturing occurred and shifts away from other industries and services happened as well. You cannot look at one economic element as a standalone item and declare it's impact on an economy (or tax base) is 'x'. That is the classic economics 'all other things held equal' (that never are) line of thinking.
your referenced chart about Britain's economics had no bearing on the topic at hand, and didn't showing anything 'exponential' either. (why am I always running into conflicts over 'exponential'?: http://defensetech.org/2011/02/20/the-air-force-wants-a-new-bunker-buster-bomb-for-the-f-35/)
Anyhooo....
For the data we are looking at, only the government spending trend-line R^2 value improves significantly using a exponential or polynomial fit. The personal spending data linear trend-line fits better than the exponential trend-line does for the government spending for all that bother.
In sum, You've raised no coherent argument indicating where I am wrong or why.
Mar 8, 2015, 11:10:07 PM
Posted to There's Legal Analysis, and then there's REAL Analysis