I remembered reading a story that reported that half of US households don’t owe any income taxes, but I couldn’t remember which blog it was on, so I hit the search engines and found something a bit more interesting.

Sean Paul at the Agonist wrote the post I remembered and linked to an AP story on Yahoo Finance that is credited to Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer, for Wednesday April 7, 2010, 5:38 pm EDT.

I’m not an English or Journalism professor so I won’t give an opinion in those areas, but it seems very similar to the CNN Money post, 47% will pay no federal income tax, credited to Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer, for October 3, 2009.

On the general point of half of US households not paying income taxes – with about 10% unemployed, and another 10% underemployed, and real wages falling, people below the median US income don’t make enough to pay income taxes. These people are paying payroll taxes, and the dozens of other taxes that are imposed by the Federal, state, and local governments, and their payroll taxes have been covering a significant portion of the deficit caused by the Hedgemony’s tax cuts.

As I keep saying: there was never an income tax surplus, nor has the income tax taken in enough to actually balance the Federal budget in decades. FICA tax excess payments were used to cover the deficit and FICA tax payment were all of the Clinton budget “surplus”. The only problem with Social Security is that the government has to pay back what it borrowed.

I’m a bit annoyed, as about 40 different types of aircraft have been flying overhead today in preparation for the 75^th birthday bash for Eglin Air Force Base, and the cloud cover has kept me from seeing them.

This evening the road paving crew are back with their noisy behemoth machines and irritating back-up beepers. They are a bit further away, but I have windows open because of the nice temperatures.

With that in mind I would like to point out to Dr. Krugman, that he is off the mark on his Birds and Bees blogging. He may take the holy writ of the priests at the National Bureau of Economic Research that the recession began in December of 2007, but if you look at the price of oil and the unemployment numbers for all of 2007, it was obvious to Main Street that things were turning bad. If the recession had started in December of 2007, Christmas sales figures wouldn’t have been as abysmal as they were.

Here’s a news flash for the econ types – the volatile energy and food segments of the inflation index are two of the largest segments of the household budgets for real people. When they spike, real people have a problem.

From PZ Myers: you know you are scrapping bottom when the Ku Klux Klan issues a statement disavowing any association, past, present, or future, with you. It must make Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church proud to know they are too offensive for the Klan.

From the CBC: Newly found fossils could link to human ancestor

Two fossil skeletons found in South Africa are members of a previously unknown species that fits in the transition between ancient “ape-men” and humans, scientists say.

The newly discovered species, named Australopithecus sediba, has characteristics of both primitive ape-like species and later humans, and the research team behind the find says it’s the best candidate yet found for a direct ancestor of the lineage of humans.

This is another step in the process of evolution. If what has been reported is accurate, this species was capable of surviving in both the trees and on the ground, and was developing many of the cranial features of the later Homo erectus.

We now have evidence that there was no dominant hominid species until fairly recently, and Homo sapiens was the surviving branch of many variants, i.e. there were options until recently, and modern man was the winner.

We beat nature, now we need to survive our own actions.