Complexity” Of The Us Tax

Here’s a meaningless abstraction for you, Fellow Reckoner. You ready? US GDP grew at an annualized rate of 1.7% for 2011. Now, what does that sentence actually tell us? What does it reveal about life or the quality of it; about the long arc of history and where we are along it; about the Heavens above us, the Hells below and our place in the present somewhere in between? What useful piece of information does this arrangement of letters and numbers divulge that has this morning’s news wires so abuzz with excitement? What, if anything, does it really say? Nothing. Well, nothing important anyway. It simply tells us that a measurement with no meaningful connection to reality has, in an attempt to quantify the size of something that does not exist, moved in a direction that does not matter. ...