America’s most overrated movie director, Oliver Stone, has interviewed his old pal, Fidel Castro, for yet another mind-numbing documentary. The Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin has written this piece on the latest Stone-Castro lovefest, and he captures the absurdity of the moment wonderfully:

Having revived the Western with Deadwood and the gangster genre with The Sopranos, HBO is taking on science fiction/fantasy. Looking For Fidel, Oliver Stone’s latest round of pattycake with Fidel Castro, resembles nothing so much as one of those old the-land-that-time-forgot movies, with a couple of lumbering stop-action dinosaurs wrestling harmlessly in front of a crowd of natives that’s trying hard not to look bored while it waits for evolution to take its course.
Looking For Fidel came about after Castro cracked down on dissidents last May, just as an earlier Stone documentary, Comandante, was about to debut on HBO. The network, embarrassed to be screening a kissy-face hagiography at the same time Castro was carrying out assembly-line executions and clapping his political opponents in prison by the score, ordered Stone to go back to Cuba and interview Castro about the crackdown.
The result is this collision of two aging irrelevancies, an antiquarian dictator who has already outlived his ideology and a once-talented director whose face is as puffy and dissolute as his films.
Stone occasionally prods Castro with an uncomfortable question about free speech or secret trials. But followups are non-existent, and mostly Stone allows the dictator to stage his own little set pieces for the cameras. In one, Castro generously meets with some accused hijackers, who with straight faces say 30 years in prison would be a generous sentence.
In another, he walks among adoring throngs of Cubans, whose burbling praise for the Revolution was so wildly delusional (they claim, among other things, that Cuba is the only country in the world where blacks are permitted to own businesses) that I had to wonder if they weren’t a deliberate attempt at sabotaging the documentary.
At times, it’s hard to tell who is less lucid, Stone or Castro.
Stone, halting and distracted, seems to be reciting a list he learned 20 years ago as he ticks off the Latin American countries supposedly less democratic than Cuba — including Brazil and Chile, both now governed by socialists.
Castro, meanwhile, suffers through some seriously senior moments. What are we to make of this impromptu little speech? ”Today, with a computer and a dozen compact disks, you can hold all the literature ever written,” he tells Stone. “So many things have changed. I do not know why the world has been making so much progress to end up in this. I am so sorry for the younger generation.”
Other times, his meaning is all too clear. If Cuba is poor, Castro insists, it’s because of the U.S. embargo. If people are so desperate to leave Cuba that they’ll fling themselves into the ocean on inner tubes, it’s because the United States encourages them. If any Cubans oppose him, it’s because they’re on the CIA payroll. Anything and everything that’s wrong in Cuba can be traced back to a policy made in Washington, never in Havana.
If it were otherwise, Castro swears, he would quit at once: ”If you can prove to me that under the current circumstances in Cuba, that would be the best thing for the country and the most useful thing for this country, I would be willing to step aside.” Yes, comandante, we have a word for that in English. We call it elections.

Hat tip to Virginia Postrel for the link to this hilarious review.

This Journal Economic Committee report does a good job of concisely explaining the progressive nature of the United States’ income tax system. The report contains this classic observation:

Collectively, the bottom 40% of earners thus pays little or nothing in income taxes. (Like all taxpayers, however, they do face the time, frustration, and monetary costs of preparing their taxes and complying with the complex tax code.)

While I have no problem with the progressive nature of the American tax system, the complexity of the system continues to be one of those outrageous aspects of American life that seems impervious to change. The Republicans occasionally talk about tax simplification, but then do nothing meaningful about it. The Democrats don’t even talk about it. Granted, the politics of simplifying the American income tax system is fraught with interest group obstacles. However, there are few political initiatives that would do more to improve Americans’ perception of their government than income tax simplification.
Meanwhile, Penn psychology professor Jonathon Baron and USC professor Edward J. McCaffery have published “Masking Redistribution (or its Absence)”, the abstract of which provides as follows:

Research has shown that people vary widely in their support or opposition to progressive taxation. We argue here that the perception of progressiveness itself is affected by the nature of the tax system and by the way it is framed, or presented. Experiments conducted over the World-Wide Web and using within-subject design demonstrate that subjects suffer from a range of heuristics and biases in understanding and supporting progressive or redistributive taxation. After reviewing some prior results, we report three new studies. Two of them indicate that people do not sufficiently appreciate the reduction of progressiveness that results from the use of tax deductions to partly reimburse private expenditures. The third indicates that people do not fully appreciate the reduction in progressiveness that results from cuts in government services.

Hat tip to the Law and Economics blog for the link to this article.