Distributional Analyses of Revenue Options for Alaska

A new report commissioned by Rasmuson Foundation as part of its Plan4Alaska campaign finds that while strategies currently proposed to close Alaska's $4 billion budget gap would significantly improve the state's fiscal standing, a diversified revenue strategy is needed this year to close the gap and equitably distribute financial impact. Rasmuson Foundation commissioned the report in response to comments from lawmakers about the dearth of economic data available to gauge the impact of various revenue scenarios. "Distributional Analyses of Revenue Options for Alaska" was produced by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), a nonprofit, non-partisan research organization with a mission to ensure that elected officials, the media, and the general public have access to accurate, timely, and straightforward information that allows them to understand the effects of current and proposed tax policies. ITEP used Gov. Bill Walker's Sustainable Alaska Plan in its analysis, and evaluated its proposed reductions to the Permanent Fund dividend, and income, alcohol, tobacco, and motor fuel tax increases to determine effects on Alaskans at different income levels. ITEP found that a fiscal plan that relied heavily on Permanent Fund earnings without income tax and other forms of taxation would disproportionately impact middle-income working families and low-income Alaskans. The report also examines a variety of options to derive more revenue from the income tax and less from reductions to the dividend. Among the alternative income tax structures examined are a doubling of the governor's proposed tax, the implementation of a more progressive income tax proposed by Rep. Paul Seaton in 2015, and the enactment of a 6.4 percent flat tax on incomes over$100,000 (or over $200,000 for married couples)

Old habits out and new habits in : the new way to waste food

We as humans don't realize how wasteful we are at times. We have the expectation that food will always be readily available to us and, when we are done with it all, a trash truck will come and haul away our unwanted scraps. Every year, billions of pounds of food are discarded, and that number is rising. In the United States alone, 40% of all food produced for human consumption goes uneaten every year, which converts to $165 billion in wasted revenue.Campus Writing Progra

The security of NTP's datagram protocol

For decades, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) has been used to synchronize computer clocks over untrusted network paths. This work takes a new look at the security of NTP’s datagram protocol. We argue that NTP’s datagram protocol in RFC5905 is both underspecified and flawed. The NTP specifications do not sufficiently respect (1) the conflicting security requirements of different NTP modes, and (2) the mechanism NTP uses to prevent off-path attacks. A further problem is that (3) NTP’s control-query interface reveals sensitive information that can be exploited in off-path attacks. We exploit these problems in several attacks that remote attackers can use to maliciously alter a target’s time. We use network scans to find millions of IPs that are vulnerable to our attacks. Finally, we move beyond identifying attacks by developing a cryptographic model and using it to prove the security of a new backwards-compatible client/server protocol for NTP.https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1006.pdfhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1006.pdfPublished versio

Undocumented Immigrants' State and Local Tax Contributions

In the public debates over federal immigration reform, sufficient and accurate information about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants is often lacking. The reality is the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States pay billions of dollars in local, state and federal taxes, and their tax contributions would increase under immigration policy reform.In November 2014, President Obama used his executive authority to announce that he would allow up to 4 million undocumented immigrants to apply for temporary reprieve from deportation and a three-year, renewable work permit. His action also built on his 2012 grant of this relief to 1.2 million undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children (up to 300,000 new undocumented immigrants are newly eligible under the 2014 action). Eligible individuals must either be parents of US citizens or lawful permanent residents and have resided in the United States for more than five years or be youth who have lived continuously in the United States since 2010, be at least 15 years old, and either be enrolled in school or have a high school degree or its equivalent. All told, up to 5.2 million undocumented immigrants could benefit from the president's executive actions taken in 2012 and 2014.This report provides state-by-state and national estimates on current state and local tax contributions of the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States as of 2012, the increase in contributions if all 11.4 million were granted lawful permanent residence, and the increase in contributions of the 5.2 million undocumented immigrants directly affected by President Obama's executive actions in 2012 and 2014

Novel muon imaging techniques

Owing to the high penetrating power of high-energy cosmic ray muons, muon imaging techniques can be used to image large bulky objects, especially objects with heavy shielding. Muon imaging systems work just like CT scanners in the medical imaging field—that is, they can reveal information inside of a target. There are two forms of muon imaging techniques: muon absorption imaging and muon multiple scattering imaging. The former is based on the flux attenuation of muons, and the latter is based on the multiple scattering of muons in matter. The muon absorption imaging technique is capable of imaging very large objects such as volcanoes and large buildings, and also smaller objects like spent fuel casks; the muon multiple scattering imaging technique is best suited to inspect smaller objects such as nuclear waste containers. Muon imaging techniques can be applied in a broad variety of fields, i.e. from measuring the magma thickness of volcanoes to searching for secret cavities in pyramids, and from monitoring the borders of countries checking for special nuclear materials to monitoring the spent fuel casks for nuclear safeguards applications. In this paper, the principles of muon imaging are reviewed. Image reconstruction algorithms such as Filtered Back Projection and Maximum Likelihood Expectation Maximization are discussed. The capability of muon imaging techniques is demonstrated through a Geant4 simulation study for imaging a nuclear spent fuel cask