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My point wasn't to prove that income tax causes murders, it was to disprove that income tax prevents them.
by User23 8y ago
My point wasn't to prove that income tax causes murders, it was to disprove that income tax prevents them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 8y agoYou didn't prove or disprove anything because correlation does not imply causation. Unless you have a study to show that people are murdering each other specifically because of income tax it could have been due to literally anything else. For instance, the divorce rate in Maine in perfectly correlated to per capita consumption of margarine, but one doesn't cause the other (http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) -- or, for instance, the Dick Act was passed just a few years before WWI but it certainly didn't cause that either.
- entee 8y agoMy favorite is that umbrella usage is highly correlated to rain.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoMy favorite is that trolling is highly correlated to the internet.
- User23 8y agoSince correlation is a consequence of causation, the absence of correlation suffices to disprove claims of causation.
- arcticbull 8y agoI think it’s fair to say that what you spend that income tax on is vastly more relevant. Yes, I agree, the very act of taxing people and then spending it on, say, NASA (or burning it) doesn’t change the gun murder rate but nobody’s every made that assertion. The assertion is you can spend it on evidence based programs like gun control to reduce the murder rate — and there’s plenty of evidence in other countries that it works. The lack of correlation you spoke of isn’t relevant to the topic per se because the taxation act is a means to solutions, not a solution.