2008 Golden Horse Awards Red Carpet, well done!

Just watched 2008 Golden Horse Awards (GHA) Red Carpet Show. It was hosted by Mickey Huang Zi-Jiao Huang and Sui Tang. I felt that it was very well done and well presented. Guests were given plenty of time for introductions and banter with and among the hosts did not feel forced and was relatively entertaining despite the length.

One thing I noticed is that mainland was rather well represented. Presence of mainland heavyweights such as Zhou Xun and Zhou Wei was quite a surprise. In past years, mainland and HK presence was always rather weak. Particularly mainland as getting Visa was always an issue. I commend the new administration for softening the relations with mainland to help this happen. However, it is probably the resurgence of TW cinema, led by Cape No. 7, led to greater interest in the Golden Horse Awards. It meant that GHA is a place to be seen.

However, the show did not go off without a hitch. There was conflict caused by big stars preempting those who arrived on time. However, everyone was professional and delivered a strong showing. Hopefully, this is a signal in a resurgence in TW cinema against the bear economy.

Taxes

A much quoted statistic is that top 5% of wage earners pay for 60% of the taxes. However, that is a severe distortion of statistics. Below is the information from tax year 2006

AGI	%returns	%income	%taxes
1MM and up	0.3	15.1	26.7
500k-1MM	0.4	5.0	9.2
200-500k	2.2	11.1	17.3
100-200k	8.8	20.0	20.4
50-100k	21.6	26.4	18.0
$1-50k	66.7	22.4	8.4

So, from this table, top 2.9% pay for the 53.2% of the taxes. So, top 5% paying 60% is about right. However, this is a severe manipulation of stats. A more fair way of presenting the data is that those making top 31.1% of income pays 53.2% of taxes.

Even this presentation is a distortion. The first column is not Gross income, but the ADJUSTED Gross Income. This means that deductions have already been deducted from the actual income. So, it's easily conceivable that the top 2 tiers (top .7%) actually receive 2-3x more income than actually shown in AGI. At 2x, it would bring their income to roughly the amount of tax that they pay, at 3x, it means that they would be paying a lower rate than avg of the rest 99% of the population.

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