Also on today’s menu:
IRS Data Disproves Trump Tax Cuts Benefited The Rich
Scientists’ Darwin Awards
Two teenage passengers in a 2004 Chevrolet pickup truck died in a crash on Sunday, December 5, when the driver, Jordan Couture of Milton VT, lost control while northbound on Interstate 93 in Littleton.
Troopers from New Hampshire State Police-Troop F and members of the Littleton Police Department responded to the crash just south of Exit 44 about 6:30 p.m.
They say that, when Couture lost control of the truck, it went off the left side of the road, entering the median and sliding sideways before rolling over and ejecting the two passengers. Couture was treated for minor injuries at Littleton Regional Hospital.
IRS Data Disproves Trump Tax Cuts Benefited The Rich
Justin Haskins, editorial director and research fellow at the Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank, makes the case that Democrats have it all wrong when they say wealthy households have benefited disproportionately and unfairly from the 2017 tax reform law passed by Republicans and signed by former President Trump.
Citing data from the Internal Revenue Service, Haskins says that the effects of tax credits and other reforms in the tax code gave filers with adjusted gross incomes between $15,000 and $50,000 an average tax cut between 16 and 26 percent in 2018, the first year that the Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data are available. Filers earning $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break between 15 and 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 had tax cuts between 11 and 13 percent. Meanwhile, every filer earning $200,000 or more saw an increased tax burden in 2018 compared to 2017.
“That means that Republicans’ tax reform law resulted in the tax code becoming slightly more progressive — the exact opposite of what Democrats have claimed over the past four years,” he writes.
Scientists’ Darwin Awards
Gizmodo ran an article about “9 Inventors Who Were Killed By Their Own Inventions,” beginning with Franz Reichelt, “The Flying Tailor,” an Austrian-born tailor living in France during the early 1900s who created the forerunner of today’s wingsuits: an entirely wearable parachute suit. He was so confident in his invention that he invited the local press to film his flight from the Eiffel Tower in February 1912. Reichelt leaped from the tower in his parachute suit and plummeted to the ground, dying almost instantly. The entire event was captured on film.
Soviet engineer Valerian Abakovsky invented the Aerowagon, using parts of an early airplane and parts of an early railcar which he planned to use carrying Soviet officials around Russia. On July 24, 1921, Abakovsky took a handful of international delegates on a trip from Moscow. The vehicle derailed, killing seven of the 22 people on board, including Abakovsky, who was only 25 years old at the time.
Ohio-based inventor Henry Smolinski thought he solved the problem in the 1970s with the “AVE Mizar,” putting the rudders and wings of a Cessna aircraft onto the back of a Ford Pinto. “It turns out the thing worked as well as it looked — on September 11th, 1973, during a test flight in Camarillo, California, one of the wing struts detached from the body of the Pinto while the machine was mid-flight. Needless to say, the car plummeted, and the Pinto (along with Smolinski, who was at the controls at the time) didn’t survive the trip,” the article states.
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