Itemized Tax Deductions for Individuals: Data Analysis

[Excerpt] Reforming or limiting itemized tax deductions for individuals has gained the interest of policymakers as one way to increase federal tax revenue, increase the share of taxes paid by higher-income tax filers, simplify the tax code, or reduce incentives that might lead to inefficient economic behavior. However, limits on deductions, in the views of some, would have adverse economic effects or changes in the distributional burden of the federal income tax code. Discussions about itemized tax deduction reform are informed by scrutiny of tax filer data. This report analyzes the most recently available public data from the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS’s) Statistics of Income (SOI) to provide an overview of who claims itemized deductions, what they claim them for, and the amount in deductions claimed. In addition, the revenue loss associated with several of the larger deductions is presented using data obtained from the Joint Committee on Taxation’s (JCT) tax expenditure estimates. This report concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of various policy options to reform or limit itemized deductions. More in-depth discussion on options for reforming itemized tax deductions, as a whole or individually, can be found in other CRS reports

Interface concerns of ejector integration in V/STOL aircraft

A number of areas which have in the past contributed to weight, complexity, and thrust losses in the ejector-powered V/STOL vehicle were identified. Most of these interfaces taken singly do not represent a severe compromise to the vehicle; however, the bottom line is that the sum of compromises and the subsequent effects on performance, flight operations and maintenance have rendered the ejector V/STOL aircraft unattractive. In addition to some of the unique ejector/aircraft integration problems, the vehicle by virtue of having a V/STOL capability, is compromised in other areas. To be successful and acceptable, the advantages must outweight the disadvantages and simplicity with minimum penalties must be the rule. It is concluded that more emphasis must be placed on the ejector/aircraft interface for the concept to be successful

Flight from the Fight? Civil War and its Effects on Refugees

Civil war dominates conflict in the modern era. An effect of this is a large number of refugees, who flee from war-torn countries in favor of lands where they can live in safety. This paper examines the extent to which the number of these refugees is affected by the number of civil wars a country has had in a year. Previous literature suggests that civil wars increase destruction in a state and threaten people’s lives, which encourages migration out of a warring country. Based on this, this paper hypothesizes that increasing the number of civil wars in a country will likewise increase the number of refugees leaving that country. However, this explanation is not supported by this paper’s OLS model, with respect for human rights and type of government being shown as more important factors than the number of civil conflicts. A possible reason for this finding is the destruction of critical transportation infrastructure resulting from civil war. The results of this study warrant further investigation into what exactly motivates refugee behavior, especially during civil wars

Luminoso at SemEval-2018 Task 10: Distinguishing Attributes Using Text Corpora and Relational Knowledge

Luminoso participated in the SemEval 2018 task on "Capturing Discriminative Attributes" with a system based on ConceptNet, an open knowledge graph focused on general knowledge. In this paper, we describe how we trained a linear classifier on a small number of semantically-informed features to achieve an $F_1$ score of 0.7368 on the task, close to the task's high score of 0.75.Comment: SemEval 2018, 5 page

Data management for community research projects: A JGOFS case study

Since the mid 1980s, much of the marine science research effort in the United Kingdom has been focused into large scale collaborative projects involving public sector laboratories and university departments, termed Community Research Projects. Two of these, the Biogeochemical Ocean Flux Study (BOFS) and the North Sea Project incorporated large scale data collection to underpin multidisciplinary modeling efforts. The challenge of providing project data sets to support the science was met by a small team within the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) operating as a topical data center. The role of the data center was to both work up the data from the ship's sensors and to combine these data with sample measurements into online databases. The working up of the data was achieved by a unique symbiosis between data center staff and project scientists. The project management, programming and data processing skills of the data center were combined with the oceanographic experience of the project communities to develop a system which has produced quality controlled, calibrated data sets from 49 research cruises in 3.5 years of operation. The data center resources required to achieve this were modest and far outweighed by the time liberated in the scientific community by the removal of the data processing burden. Two online project databases have been assembled containing a very high proportion of the data collected. As these are under the control of BODC their long term availability as part of the UK national data archive is assured. The success of the topical data center model for UK Community Research Project data management has been founded upon the strong working relationships forged between the data center and project scientists. These can only be established by frequent personal contact and hence the relatively small size of the UK has been a critical factor. However, projects covering a larger, even international scale could be successfully supported by a network of topical data centers managing online databases which are interconnected by object oriented distributed data management systems over wide area networks

ConceptNet at SemEval-2017 Task 2: Extending Word Embeddings with Multilingual Relational Knowledge

This paper describes Luminoso's participation in SemEval 2017 Task 2, "Multilingual and Cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity", with a system based on ConceptNet. ConceptNet is an open, multilingual knowledge graph that focuses on general knowledge that relates the meanings of words and phrases. Our submission to SemEval was an update of previous work that builds high-quality, multilingual word embeddings from a combination of ConceptNet and distributional semantics. Our system took first place in both subtasks. It ranked first in 4 out of 5 of the separate languages, and also ranked first in all 10 of the cross-lingual language pairs.Comment: 5 pages, accepted to the SemEval workshop at ACL 201

SBA Veterans Assistance Programs: An Analysis of Contemporary Issues

[Excerpt] This report opens with an examination of the economic circumstances of veteran-owned businesses drawn from the Bureau of the Census’s 2012 Survey of Business Owners (SBO). It then provides a brief overview of veterans’ employment experiences, comparing unemployment and labor force participation rates for veterans, veterans who have left the military since September 2001, and nonveterans. The report also describes employment assistance programs offered by several federal agencies to assist veterans in their transition from the military to the civilian labor force and examines, in greater detail, the SBA’s veteran business development programs, the SBA’s efforts to assist veterans’ access to capital, and the SBA’s veteran contracting programs. It also discusses the SBA’s Military Reservist Economic Injury Disaster Loan program and P.L. 114-38, the Veterans Entrepreneurship Act of 2015, which authorized and made permanent the SBA’s recent practice of waiving the SBAExpress loan program’s one time, up-front loan guarantee fee for veterans (and their spouse)