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Monday, October 31, 2011

Health:  Childhood Obesity

In 2009, a 555-pound, 14-year-old South Carolina boy was removed to foster care after his mother was arrested and charged with criminal neglect. The state's Department of Social Services had determined that without state intervention, the boy was at risk of serious harm.

For more, see Obesity Fuels Custody Fights by Ashby Jones and Shirley S. Wang, October 29, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Taxes:  Ronald Reagan's Tax Increases

Republicans today prefer to forget that Ronald Reagan signed into law 11 major tax increases, including the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the largest peacetime tax increase in American history.
Of course, there was still a net tax cut during the Reagan administration. ... the federal budget for fiscal year 1990 shows that revenue was $264.4 billion lower in 1988 than it would have been without the 1981 tax cut. But Reagan effectively took back half of it by his last year in office.

For more, see The Republican Idea of Tax Reform by Bruce Bartlett, October 25, 2011 at Economix.

Health:  Alcohol Linked to Better Survival After Heart Attack

Women who drank anywhere from a few alcoholic drinks a month to more than three a week in the year leading up to a heart attack ended up living longer than women who never drank alcohol, according to a study.
"One thing that was interesting was that we didn't see differences among different beverage types," said Joshua Rosenbloom, a student at Harvard Medical School who led the study.
After at least 10 years of follow up, the team found that 44 out of every 100 women who had abstained from alcohol had died, while 25 out of every 100 light drinkers and 18 out of every 100 heavy drinkers had died.
In an earlier study including men and women, O'Keefe found that people who continued to drink moderately after having a heart attack had better health than those who abstained.

"You don't need to assume that people need to stop drinking once they develop heart disease," he said. "The problem is that alcohol is a slippery slope, and while we know that a little bit is good for us, a lot of it is really bad."

For more, see Alcohol Linked to Better Survival After Heart Attack October 28, 2011 at Fox News.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Economics:  Back to Where We Began. Finally.

The American economy has finally reached the size it was before the recession began four years ago, according to the latest gross domestic product report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

For more, see Back to Where We Began. Finally. by Catherine Rampell, October 27, 2011 at Economix.

International:  Brazil Trails Swaziland in World Bank Competitiveness Study

Brazil slipped six places in the World Bank's annual competitiveness study, as the world's seventh-largest economy fell behind countries including Swaziland and Nicaragua for the ease of setting up a business.

Brazil slipped to 126th place among 183 economies ranked in the World Bank's Doing Business survey published yesterday. The decline comes even as Brazil's central bank expects record foreign direct investment this year of $60 billion and the country invests in roads, ports and stadiums ahead of its hosting the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.

In Brazil it takes 119 days to start a business, compared with 14 days in Colombia, which was among the 12 countries that most improved its business climate last year, according to the study. The Andean nation jumped five spots to 42nd in the world. Chile rose two places to 39th, taking back from Peru, which fell two spots to 41st, the title of Latin America's most business- friendly economy.

For more, see Brazil Trails Swaziland in World Bank Competitiveness Study by Randall Woods, October 20, 2011 at businessweek.

Wealth:  Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation's Income, Study Finds

From an article Martha contributed ...

... the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, ...

that from 1979 to 2007, average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275% for the 1% of the population with the highest income. For others in the top 20% of the population, average real after-tax household income grew by 65%.

By contrast, the budget office said, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18%.

And for the three-fifths of people in the middle of the income scale, the growth in such household income was just under 40%.

The findings, based on a rigorous analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Census Bureau, are generally consistent with studies by some private researchers and academic economists. But because they carry the imprimatur of the nonpartisan budget office, they are likely to have a major impact on the debate in Congress over the fairness of federal tax and spending policies.

For more, see Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation's Income, Study Finds by Robert Pear, October 25, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Education:  Cost of College on the Rise (Again)

Is this smart?

For more, see Cost of College on the Rise (Again) by Matthew Philips, October 27, 2011 at Freakonomics.

Health:  Study Shows Why It's Hard to Keep Weight off

For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesized that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.

But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10% of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants' metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.

Dr. Stephen Bloom, an obesity researcher at Hammersmith Hospital in London, said the study needed to be repeated under more rigorous conditions, but added, It is showing something I believe in deeply — it is very hard to lose weight. And the reason, he said, is that your hormones work against you.

For more, see Study Shows Why It's Hard to Keep Weight off by Gina Kolata, October 26, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Economics:  The Path Not Taken

... bailing out the banks while punishing workers is not, in fact, a recipe for prosperity. But was there any alternative? Well, that's why I'm in Iceland, attending a conference about the country that did something different.

If you've been reading accounts of the financial crisis, or watching film treatments like the excellent Inside Job, you know that Iceland was supposed to be the ultimate economic disaster story: its runaway bankers saddled the country with huge debts and seemed to leave the nation in a hopeless position.

But a funny thing happened on the way to economic Armageddon: Iceland's very desperation made conventional behavior impossible, freeing the nation to break the rules. Where everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net. Where everyone else was fixated on trying to placate international investors, Iceland imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to maneuver.

So how's it going? Iceland hasn't avoided major economic damage or a significant drop in living standards. But it has managed to limit both the rise in unemployment and the suffering of the most vulnerable; the social safety net has survived intact, as has the basic decency of its society. Things could have been a lot worse may not be the most stirring of slogans, but when everyone expected utter disaster, it amounts to a policy triumph.

And there's a lesson here for the rest of us: The suffering that so many of our citizens are facing is unnecessary. If this is a time of incredible pain and a much harsher society, that was a choice. It didn't and doesn't have to be this way.

For more, see The Path Not Taken by Paul Krugman, October 27, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Friday, October 28, 2011

Education:  College Is Worth It

For more, see College Is Worth It by Catherine Rampell, October 27, 2011 at Economix.

International:  Iran's Supreme Leader Floats Proposal to Abolish Presidency

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was appointed supreme leader for life in 1989 by Shiite Muslim clerics, said in a speech last week that, if deemed appropriate, Iran could do without a president.
Under the proposal, Iran would be ruled by Khamenei working in tandem with parliament, which would continue to be directly elected and would appoint one of its members to serve as prime minister.

Such a change could happen in the near or distant future, Khamenei said. The last time Iran's constitution was altered was in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic and its first supreme leader. The position of prime minister was abolished at that time.

For more, see Iran's Supreme Leader Floats Proposal to Abolish Presidency by Thomas Erdbrink, October 25, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Society:  U.S. Government Requests for Google User Data Jump

U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests during the first half of 2011 compared with 4,601 requests during the last six months of 2010. Google complied in part or completely with 93% of those requests which can include court orders and subpoenas.

The number of users and accounts affected: 11,057.

Google has an agenda here. It wants to spread this kind of information -- albeit incomplete as it does not include certain terrorism-related requests -- to push for reform of federal laws that give law enforcement unfettered access to online communications without a judge's order.

For more, see U.S. Government Requests for Google User Data Jump by Jessica Guynn, October 25, 2011 at the LA Times blog "Technology".

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Religion:  Survey of Muslims in American

Foreign born American Muslims dislike al Qaeda more than native born Muslims ...

For much, much more, see Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism, August 30, 2011 at Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

Wealth:  Why America's Highest Paid Ceos Are Insanely Overpaid

... the most rapacious pillage of shareholder property is John H. Hammergren, chairman and CEO of McKesson Pharmaceuticals. His compensation which is doesn't really capture the essence of his remuneration, was a mind blowing $131.2 million U.S. dollars. This number is obscene. It is just shy of 11% of the total $1.2 billion in net income for the entire company.

For more, see Why America's Highest Paid Ceos Are Insanely Overpaid by Christopher Helman, October 25, 2011 at Forbes.com.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Society:  Which Americans Are Most Generous, and to Whom

For more, see Which Americans Are Most Generous, and to Whom by Catherine Rampell, October 18, 2011 at Economix.

Economics:  The Wild Ride of the 1%

For decades after World War II, the top-one-percenters were the most steady line on the income and wealth charts. They gained less during good times and lost less during contractions than the rest of America.

Suddenly, in 1982, the wealthiest broke away from the rest of the economy and formed their own virtual country. Their incomes began soaring higher during good times. The top 1% of earners more than doubled their share of national income, to 20% as of 2008. Looking at another measure, the richest 1% increased their share of wealth from just over 20% to more than 33%.

Those surges were often accompanied by mini-crashes, even though the direction over time was always up. A top 1% that had once been models of financial sobriety set off on a wild ride of economic binges.

This marked a new personality type in the history of wealth: the High-Beta Rich.

"High beta" is a term used in financial markets to describe a stock or asset that has exaggerated up and down swings with the market. Tech start-ups and casino stocks have high betas, for example. Yet studies show that today's rich have higher betas than many of the riskiest gambling stocks. Between 1947 and 1982, the beta of the top 1% was a modest 0.72, meaning that their incomes moved relatively in line with the rest of America. Between 1982 and 2007, their beta soared more than three-fold.

The fallout from the "high betas" is likely to grow. As the wealthy gain a greater share of wealth and income, they account for a growing share of spending, taxes and investments. The top 5% of earners now account for 37% of consumer outlays, according to Moody's Analytics. The top 1% of earners pay 38% of federal income taxes. The richest 1% of Americans own more than half of the country's individually held stocks, according to the Federal Reserve.

As go the high-beta rich, so goes America. Their hyper-cycles will become our own, as the consumer economy, financial markets and tax revenues experience more rapid and extreme spikes and crashes.

The spending of the rich is even wilder than their incomes. The spending volatility of the top 10% of earners is now more than 10 times the spending volatility of the bottom 80%, according to one study.

For more, see The Wild Ride of the 1% by Robert Frank, October 22, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Monday, October 24, 2011

Economics:  Tax Rates and Taxes Paid, by Wealth

Here's a look at effective tax rates, a measure that includes federal income taxes, payroll taxes, and excise taxes [by income level].
Here are two more graphs to take you home: the first shows share of income by quintile and the second shows share of federal income taxes by quintile. What you'll see is that income inequality is behind tax burden inequality.

For more, see One of These Graphs Will Make You Angry About the Rich and Taxes by Derek Thompson, October 6, 2011 at The Atlantic.

Healthcare:  Our Health-Care System, in One Report Card

For more, see Our Health-Care System, in One Report Card by Sarah Kliff, October 18, 2011 at Ezra Klein.

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Economics:  Percent of Total Assets, by Wealth

For more, see Where the Top 1% Work by Derek Thompson, October 11, 2011 at Mother Jones.

Mind:  Who You Are

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it's because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35% of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65% of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads Limit 12 per customer.

We are players in a game we don't understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can't see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.

This research yielded a different vision of human nature and a different set of debates. The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.

They also figured out ways to navigate around our shortcomings. Kahneman champions the idea of adversarial collaboration — when studying something, work with people you disagree with. Tversky had a wise maxim: Let us take what the terrain gives. Don't overreach. Understand what your circumstances are offering.

For more, see Who You Are by David Brooks, October 20, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Economics:  Average Hourly Earnings, 1964-2008

For more, see Who Really Robbed the Middle Class? Maybe It Was Health Care by Derek Thompson, October 13, 2011 at The Atlantic.

Health:  Vitamin E Is Linked to Prostate Cancer

Researchers studying vitamin E supplements as a way to reduce men's risk of prostate cancer found they actually had the opposite effect, increasing the risk slightly, according to a study funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are based on long-term follow-up of participants in a large cancer-prevention trial known as Select. That trial, meant to study whether supplements of vitamin E, selenium or a combination of the two nutrients could prevent prostate cancer, was stopped three years ago because a review of the data showed no benefit, compared with a dummy pill.

For more, see Vitamin E Is Linked to Prostate Cancer by Katherine Hobson, October 12, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Economics:  Bankers' Salaries vs. Everyone Else's

For more, see Bankers' Salaries vs. Everyone Else's by Catherine Rampell, October 11, 2011 at Economix.

Mind:  The Brain on Trial

After Charles Whitman shot 45 people from the top of the University of Texas Tower, ...

[his] body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman's brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression. By the late 1800s, researchers had discovered that damage to the amygdala caused emotional and social disturbances. In the 1930s, the researchers Heinrich Klüver and Paul Bucy demonstrated that damage to the amygdala in monkeys led to a constellation of symptoms, including lack of fear, blunting of emotion, and overreaction. Female monkeys with amygdala damage often neglected or physically abused their infants. In humans, activity in the amygdala increases when people are shown threatening faces, are put into frightening situations, or experience social phobias. Whitman's intuition about himself—that something in his brain was changing his behavior—was spot-on.
When your biology changes, so can your decision-making and your desires. The drives you take for granted (I'm a heterosexual/homosexual, I'm attracted to children/adults, I'm aggressive/not aggressive, and so on) depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption.
Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It's a charitable idea, but demonstrably wrong. People's brains are vastly different.

Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don't affect how people behave, consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You're three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1% of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.

Free will may exist (it may simply be beyond our current science), but one thing seems clear: if free will does exist, it has little room in which to operate. It can at best be a small factor riding on top of vast neural networks shaped by genes and environment. In fact, free will may end up being so small that we eventually think about bad decision-making in the same way we think about any physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.

For much more about how the law should be changed due to this, see The Brain on Trial by David Eagleman, July, 2011 at The Atlantic.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Health:  The First Genetically Modified Animal for Consumption

The FDA has completed its analysis of the first genetically modified animal likely to hit supermarket shelves: the AquAdvantage salmon, made by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies, Inc. Thanks to some added genes, the salmon grows 2-6 times the size of a normal Atlantic salmon in half the time, promising some respite for the planet's heavily taxed natural fish stocks, a third of which are near extinction or exhaustion.

For more, see FDA Completes Review of First Genetically Modified Animal for Consumption by Veronique Greenwood, October 11, 2011 at 80beats.

Government:  U.S. Evaluating Government Programs More than Ever

According to a new report commissioned by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts in the U.K. (because the Brits would like to figure out how to do this, too), the Obama administration is instituting the most sweeping and potentially groundbreaking emphasis on rigorous program evaluation ever conducted by the federal government. It has been trying to identify social programs that work, scientifically evaluate how they work and apply those models in awarding grant money.

The hope is that Uncle Sam — with the help of rigorous social science — will stop supporting teen pregnancy prevention programs that don't actually prevent teen pregnancies, or childhood literacy programs that don't teach all that many children how to read.

The authors cited six initiatives begun under Obama in which they conclude the role of evidence has been unprecedented. The Department of Health and Human Services has commissioned literature reviews on programs targeting teen pregnancies and parental home visitation. Expert panels have reviewed applicants for the Social Innovation and Investing in Innovation funds. Program guidelines for the Community College Challenge Fund and the Workforce Innovation Fund through the departments of Labor and Education have stressed the importance of evidence-based strategies and evaluation.

For more, see U.S. Evaluating Government Programs More than Ever by Emily Badger, September 14, 2011 at Miller-McCune.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Diversion:  Gallery Los Olivos to Display Martha Inman Lorch Artwork

Travel and discovery will be on display during October at Gallery Los Olivos when featured artist Martha Inman Lorch exhibits a collection of watercolors and jewelry in an aptly titled show called “Artist with a Passport.”

The exhibition runs Oct. 1 through 31

For more, see Gallery Los Olivos to Display Martha Inman Lorch Artwork, September 29, 2011 at Santa Ynez Valley News.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Technology:  India Announces $35 Tablet Computer to Help Lift Villagers Out of Poverty

Developer Datawind is selling the tablets to the government for about $45 each, and subsidies will reduce that to $35 for students and teachers.
... the Aakash has a color screen and provides word processing, Web browsing and video conferencing. The Android 2.2-based device has two USB ports and 256 megabytes of RAM.

For more, see India Announces $35 Tablet Computer to Help Lift Villagers Out of Poverty, October 5, 2011 at The Washington Post.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Education:  U.S. Still Dominates in Research Universities

The chart, based on new data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, shows the distribution of the top 50 universities for a range of disciplines. Rankings are based on citations of work coming from each university's department.

The darker blue bars at the bottom of the chart refer to American universities. And as you can see, at least at the post-secondary level, we still have some top-notch schools.

For more, see U.S. Still Dominates in Research Universities by Catherine Rampell, September 30, 2011 at Economix.

Economics:  The Case Against Commodities

"I would rather back human ingenuity," says Dylan Grice, a London-based global strategist for Société Generale and a self-proclaimed skeptic about investing in commodities. "If there's no copper, we will find something else."
Natural gas as an energy source is now roughly the equivalent of $24-per-barrel oil, says Philip Verleger, an energy economist and publisher of Petroleum Economics Monthly. Ethanol, mostly made from corn or sugar cane, is also on the rise.

"We expect the oil industry's monopoly on transportation to be broken," Mr. Verleger wrote in July. In an interview, he adds, "There will be oil. I'm just not sure there will be anybody to consume it." He thinks that projections of crude-oil demand in 2025 are typically 20% to 30% too high, and that crude-oil prices are likely to drop sharply as those forecasts go awry.

Spot prices for raw materials have been basically flat, after adjusting for inflation, since 1871, vastly underperforming stocks and bonds, [Mr. Grice] wrote in a December research note titled, "Commodities for the long run? Not on your Nellie—I'd rather eat coal!"

For more, see The Case Against Commodities by Liam Pleven, October 5, 2011 at WSJ.com.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Mind:  How Did Researchers Manage to Read Movie Clips from the Brain?

Wow.

In a study published last week, researchers showed they could reconstruct video clips by watching viewers' brain activity. The video of the study's results, below, is pretty amazing, showing the original clips and their reconstructions side by side.

For more, see How Did Researchers Manage to Read Movie Clips from the Brain? by Valerie Ross, September 28, 2011 at 80beats.

Economics:  Jobless Benefits Discourage People from Finding Jobs

Many people getting unemployment start work only when it's running out.

The chart displays the fraction of persons (in Pittsburgh) receiving unemployment benefits who began working again, as a function of the number of weeks until their unemployment benefits were scheduled to be exhausted. For example, a hazard value of 0.04 for week -14 means that, among unemployed persons with 14 weeks remaining until their benefit exhaustion date, 4% of them either began working a new job or returned to their previous job.
Very few people started working during the two to three weeks prior to the exhaustion of their unemployment benefits (weeks -3 and -2 in the chart). But almost 30% started work just a week later (19% started a new job, 10% returned to a previous job).

Demand may have been lacking in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, but that did not stop unemployed people from responding to the work incentives presented to them by the unemployment insurance program (economists also looked for this pattern during a Swedish recession, and found it there too).

For more, see Do Jobless Benefits Discourage People from Finding Jobs? by Casey B. Mulligan, March 17, 2010 at Economix.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Mind:  The Limits of Empathy

In one experiment in the 1970s, researchers planted a dime in a phone booth. 87% of the people who found the dime offered to help a person who dropped some papers nearby, compared with only 4% who didn't find a dime. Empathy doesn't produce anything like this kind of effect [a temporary burst of positive emotion].

For more, see The Limits of Empathy by David Brooks, September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Economics:  Phony Fear Factor

The starting point for many claims that antibusiness policies are hurting the economy is the assertion that the sluggishness of the economy's recovery from recession is unprecedented. But, as a new paper by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute documents at length, this is just not true. Extended periods of jobless recovery after recessions have been the rule for the past two decades. Indeed, private-sector job growth since the 2007-2009 recession has been better than it was after the 2001 recession.

We might add that major financial crises are almost always followed by a period of slow growth, and U.S. experience is more or less what you should have expected given the severity of the 2008 shock.

But aren't business people complaining about the burden of taxes and regulations? Yes, but no more than usual. Mr. Mishel points out that the National Federation of Independent Business has been surveying small businesses for almost 40 years, asking them to name their most important problem. Taxes and regulations always rank high on the list, but what stands out now is a surge in the number of businesses citing poor sales — which strongly suggests that lack of demand, not fear of government, is holding business back.

For more, see Phony Fear Factor by Paul Krugman, September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

International:  A Post-Islamist Middle East?

In Turkey and Tunisia, culturally conservative parties founded on Islamic principles are rejecting the name Islamist to stake out what they see as a more democratic and tolerant vision.

In Egypt, a similar impulse has begun to fracture the Muslim Brotherhood as a growing number of politicians and parties argue for a model inspired by Turkey, where a party with roots in political Islam has thrived in a once-adamantly secular system. Some contend that the absolute monarchy of puritanical Saudi Arabia in fact violates Islamic law.

The debates are deep enough that many in the region believe that the most important struggles may no longer occur between Islamists and secularists, but rather among the Islamists themselves, pitting the more puritanical against the more liberal.
The notion of an Arab post-Islamism is not confined to Tunisia. In Libya, Ali Sallabi, the most important Islamist political leader, cites Mr. Ghannouchi as a major influence. Abdel Moneim Abou el-Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader who is running for president in Egypt, has joined several new breakaway political parties in arguing that the state should avoid interpreting or enforcing Islamic law, regulating religious taxes or barring a person from running for president based on gender or religion.

For more, see Activists in Arab World VIE to Define Islamic State by Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick, September 29, 2011 at NYTimes.com.

Taxes:  Countries' Tax Rates

Germany is #3?

For more, see Taxing Times, September 29, 2011 at The Economist.