re: #129 ObserverArt

Morning!

There might be an easy way to shoot down that stupid Romney derpage.

Ask them to look around at all the folks they know personally and figure out how many of those folks pay no taxes.

If 47% of people do not pay taxes, would not everyone know at least a couple of people that do not pay taxes. 47% is almost half America. That kind of stat should touch a whole hell of a lot of people.

Maybe some of the resident statistic freaks could confirm that for me.

You could try using this as an analogy. It’s the birthday problem. For a given number n of people in a room, what’s the probability that two of them share the same birthday? en.wikipedia.org

n p(n)
5 2.7%
10 11.7%
20 41.1%
23 50.7%
30 70.6%
40 89.1%
50 97.0%
60 99.4%
70 99.9%
100 99.99997%
200 99.9999999999999999999999999998%

Any number above 70 almost guarantees two will share the same birthday out of 365 possibilities.

Handwaving argument follows, since I am not a statistician.

In a similar way, if the distribution of taxpayers is random, then within any person’s circle of friends, family, co-workers, etc., there should be at least one person who pays no taxes. In fact, the number should be more than one.