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You can talk about all the moralistic high-ground as you want, but until that talk translates into actually helping people, you're not accomplishing anything except paying lip-service. To me, that's worse than doing nothing at all.

While I like to bash Americans as much as the next guy, I do think this is a weak point, as there is evidence that Americans do help others through charity. Below are two links obtained from a quick serach

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/a-nation-of-givers

http://philanthropy.com/article/America-s-Generosity-Divide/133775

But I suppose both you and the stats can be correct. Maybe Americans treat people far away from them nice through charity, while they treat each other and people close by like crap ;p

"Poor starving 3rd world children? Gotta help them!"
"Poor people on my street? Screw 'em!"

First: To label any government monopoly as "non-profit" is misleading; it only means that they aren't incorporated, really, and have no investors to grovel to. Most government-run monopolies are behemoths that only passably serve customers if all profits are channeled into large parasitic private interests - most of which wouldn't exist if the government hadn't bloated them to gross extremes. Example: the military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industry, education, agriculture, energy, telecommunications, etc. etc.

Second: you seem to largely believe that I'm a "Bug". Let me clear the record: I'm not a gold bug. Tying any currency to a single commodity is disastrous, and the reason for a lot of our problems in the late 19th century. The silver act I was talking about? It put us on a de facto gold standard, and that is what ruined us. Multiple commodities - and I mean 50+ strong, stable commodities (think energy, or agricultural staples, or heavy metals - or all of the above) - would tie currency into the very web that it is supposed to represent, preventing shocks and fluctuations without apocalyptic economic conditions (in which case, we'd all have bigger problems to worry about anyway).

Third: I'd like to dispel some misconceptions: Glass-Steagall wasn't completely repealed, and those parts of it that were had absolutely nothing to do with the financial crisis.

Hoarding does one thing: it allows prices to rise. This only becomes a problem when suddenly someone is dumping things back into the market. However, this isn't a problem if you have a currency based on multiple, stable commodities. Hoarding would only cause a rise in a particular market (and a loss to the hoarders), while providing an advantage to competitors that use the rise of demand to elbow into the market. Hoarding doesn't make sense to any businessman. Anywhere.

Debt-to-asset ratios are nothing to the Fed. The expansion of their books? That's like writing a ton of zeroes at the end of their listed bonds, and for some reason they don't think this will create wild changes when those bonds spread around... sigh...

Systems only wipe out everyone in interdependent webs of finance. If you have your own backed currency with controls based on contracts with private interests, your currency is essentially tied to its own micro-economy, and truly earth-shattering effects would have to be felt across the board in order to shake it.

"Scientists' voices are crucial in the debates over the global challenges of climate change, nuclear proliferation and the potential creation of new and deadly pathogens. But unlike in the past, their voices aren't being heard.'"

Four years ago a candidate for President promised to "restore science to it's rightful place" - why hasn't it happened? He got elected (and re-elected) to office on that pormise (among others)?

If they are able to get the economy expanding, create jobs, and widen the tax base, which will also help cut government spending for social services such as unemployment, the Republican plan can work, assuming some spending control.

But alas, all the evidence shows that reducing taxes on the self-declared "job creator" class doesn't actually create jobs or increase the GDP. If you've seen the timelines that show tax rates vs those effects, you've seen that the correlation is actually somewhat negative.

The whole "job creators" mantra is just more propaganda for the decades-long attempt to spin greed as a virtue.

Who is getting squeezed?

2. What income group pays the most federal income taxes today?

The latest data show that a big portion of the federal income tax burden is shouldered by a small group of the very richest Americans. The wealthiest 1 percent of the population earn 19 percent of the income but pay 37 percent of the income tax. The top 10 percent pay 68 percent of the tab. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent—those below the median income level—now earn 13 percent of the income but pay just 3 percent of the taxes. These are proportions of the income tax alone and don’t include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.

(both parties, in fact, are fascist, hawkish, and pro-corporate).

Both parties would like to see the economy grow - attacking businesses doesn't really help that.
Neither party wants to see Americans attacked, especially on American soil.
The size of government will probably continue to grow under both parties, as well as the debt, but much faster under one party than the other.
One party is more inclined to try to "eat the rich", the other to create opportunities for more to become new rich (and pay taxes).

To pretend there is no difference is nonsense.

If they are able to get the economy expanding, create jobs, and widen the tax base, which will also help cut government spending for social services such as unemployment, the Republican plan can work, assuming some spending control.

Can anyone explain how the Romney tax plan works. We've all heard it doesn't add up, so I'll just summarize that below. What I'm looking for are explanations of how it makes sense.

You can find your explanation here: The Romney Tax Plan: Not a Tax Hike on the Middle Class

Maybe you need to listen to what Romney is saying.

You can find more information and commentary on the plan here.

It doesn't seem to resemble your comments much.

This will be payed by cutting . . . Public Health Mandate, Food Stamps, Subsidized Housing and COBRA aka everything the poorest among us have to not fall into desperate poverty, disease and hunger.

I believe that it is Governor Romney's* plan to move as many people off those programs as possible to a replacement that is much better for both the poor and the taxpayer while leaving the programs for the truly needy. This replacement is called a "job". I hear they work marvels. It is strange that President Obama is trying to gut the Workfare requirements in law.

You do know he was governor of "right wing" Massachusetts, infamous for its poor farms and debtors prisons, right?

Actually, I have been listening to what Romney is saying, and he isn't saying much. He will cut the rates across the board 20%, and he will make it revenue neutral by closing some mythical loopholes. . . .

The fact is taxes have to go up for the middle class if he is going to be revenue neutral. So, either he is lying about being revenue neutral, or lying about not raising taxes on the middle class. Can't have it both ways

It appears that you don't really understand what Romney is planning, or how it works, or what the actual numbers are. I guess great minds think alike as your comments are very similar to the Obama campaign talking points about Romney's plan. Try this article, from which I excerpt, for a better understanding of Romney's plan:

The Romney Tax Plan: Not a Tax Hike on the Middle Class - By Alex Brill, The American - a magazine of ideas by the American Enterprise Institute

. . . In many regards, the Romney plan is like that of Obama’s bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission. Both plans share a structural consistency of low tax rates and a broader tax base. One important difference is that Romney proposes to keep the top tax rate on capital gains and dividends unchanged while Simpson-Bowles proposes raising those rates considerably. Furthermore, the Simpson-Bowles plan is an explicit tax increase–$80 billion a year more than even Obama has proposed–while Romney’s tax reform plan is revenue neutral.

Fallacies Behind the Democrats’ Attack

The core of the Democrats’ argument is that you can’t reduce income tax rates by 20 percent, as the Romney plan proposes, without raising taxes on the middle class. The analysis supporting this attack comes from a report by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center (TPC), purveyors of a proprietary tax model used to estimate the budgetary and distributional consequences of tax proposals. The TPC analysis concludes that there are not enough tax breaks (excluding tax preferences for savings and investment) for high-income earners to offset the cost of the lower rates. As a result, TPC estimates that the Romney plan would reduce the tax payments of high-income earners by $86 billion in 2015 and that revenue neutrality would then require an $86 billion tax increase on the middle class.

The core of the Democrats’ argument is that you can’t reduce income tax rates by 20 percent, as the Romney plan proposes, without raising taxes on the middle class.

The TPC model has an important limitation when it is used to consider the impact of such large reforms as Romney’s plan. It assumes that any tax reform would not help the economy. In this sense, the TPC model is consistent with the models used by the official revenue estimators at the U.S. Treasury Department and the Joint Committee on Taxation. But those models are intended primarily to analyze the impact of modest changes to the tax code, not fundamental tax reform. In fact, there is plentiful economic evidence that tax reform could result in measurable economic growth. Depending on the reform and the model used to analyze it, tax reform can increase the capital stock, encourage work and innovation, and improve the allocation of resources in the economy.

In addition to the modeling limitation, TPC also misconstrues analysis on the relationship between tax reform and economic growth. Not only does the TPC model assume zero economic growth, but the Center’s analysis (subsequently echoed by many other commentators) points to research I published with AEI colleague Alan Viard to argue that economic growth is not possible from revenue-neutral income tax reform. This conclusion is a false interpretation of our research.

An increase in labor supply is one means by which an economy can grow; as Viard and I pointed out, revenue-neutral tax reform is indeed unlik

I'm afraid you've got things a bit wrong.

It's also no small matter that the UK has the BBC. . . . The licensing fees you pay are amply repaid not just in terms of quality programming, but also unbiased programming.

BBC chief Mark Thompson admits 'Left-wing bias'
Mark Thompson: “There was massive left-wing bias at the BBC”

That has been found more than once, by the way.

Lastly, the UK was bombed into near-nothingness. The US never has been. The closest we've come to having to reassess economically was the Great Depression. Because we never had to rebuild from scratch, we never learned the social lessons that an experience like that offers --

19 - Ruins of Charleston, 10 - Damaged Atlanta, 7 - Burned-out Richmond

Besieged, bombarded and blocked from commerce, Charleston suffered greatly in the war. Sidney Andrews, a Northern reporter in Charleston at war’s end described it as “a city of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women, of deserted warehouses, of weed wild gardens ... of miles of grass grown streets.” - - The Destruction of Charleston in the Civil War

Ruins seen from the State Capitol - Columbia, SC, 1865

It's not socialism per-se that we're afraid of -- it's the idea that we aren't in control of our own fate. That we aren't individuals, but actually part of something more than ourselves, . . . .

Religion takes a back seat in Western Europe
The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

For us, socialism is a sign of weakness;

Soviet internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Chinese internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
North Korean internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Polish internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Czeck internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
German internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as below?)
German Nationalist Socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as above?)

The Big Lies of the Soviet Union

I was recently re-reading John Gross’s marvelously entertaining Oxford Book of Parodies when I came across a 1938 passage from George Orwell that attempts to explain the strangeness of

We aren't talking rocket scientists here. . . . . The "terrorist" are middle east versions of neo-nazi rednecks.

I'm afraid you've got things quite wrong in some important ways.

The Educated Muslim Terrorist

Nidal Hasan, Abdulmutallab and Humam al-Balawi are jihadists who were educated and came from privileged middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Hasan was an American-trained U. S. Army doctor, Abdulmutallab was a London engineering student and the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, and double-agent Dr. Humam al-Balawi was a member of the Jordanian professional class.

Many Westerners are confused by the willingness of university-educated middle-class Muslims to perpetrate barbarous acts of terrorism. It appears to be a reversal of the usual process: typically college students raised in religious households become more secularized by exposure to the humanities and sciences, and the rationalist values of the European Enlightenment. Yet when embryonic jihadists attend Western universities they graduate with their faith intact: 9/11 terrorists Mohammed Atta and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were both beneficiaries of Western university educations. These men, who sought to advance themselves with Western training and technical skills, ultimately turned against, and attempted to destroy, the very society that provided them with the means to that advancement. Instead of employing their newly acquired learning and knowledge to improve the lot of their fellow countrymen and co-religionists, they turned this very learning and knowledge against their Western benefactors.

This phenomenon begs the question: How do jihadists reconcile such hypocrisy and ingratitude in their own minds?

As the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie proved, the list of Jihad’s grievances against the West is subtle and inventive. The exquisite sensitivities of the faithful guarantee the manufacture of injury and insult without end, providing inspiration for Islam’s perennial street theater; for no sooner does the Arab street grow tired of one threadbare grievance, e.g. Israel, than it discovers another in an irreverent Danish cartoon. . . . .

In Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, Marc Sageman notes that eruptions of terrorist violence have little to do with economic social conditions; terrorist movements evolve slowly, spike quickly, and disappear with unexpected suddenness, and “cannot be explained through slow-moving societal forces and cultural templates.” Sageman disputes the popular notion that terrorists are mentally ill, poor, uneducated sociopaths: most of the 9/11 terrorist were, like Mohammed Atta, well-educated, many of them university graduates, i.e. psychologically stable individuals from middle-class families. Most telling of all, four fifths of these jihadists were expatriates, or the offspring of expatriates, who had immigrated to the West. In a word, they were members of the intelligentsia, confirming Arnold Toynbee’s observation that this class is fertile ground for revolutionary violence. . . . More

What Makes a Terrorist

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, policymakers, scholars, and ordinary citizens asked a key question: What would make people willing to give up their lives to wreak mass destruction in a foreign land? In short, what makes a terrorist?

A popular explanation was that economic deprivation and a lack of education caused people to adopt extreme views and turn to terrorism. For example, in July 2005, after the bombings of the London transit system, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, “Ultimately what we now know, if we did not before

The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries.

With

Q. Are Americans more or less charitable than citizens of other countries?

A. No developed country approaches American giving. For example, in 1995 (the most recent year for which data are available), Americans gave, per capita, three and a half times as much to causes and charities as the French, seven times as much as the Germans, and 14 times as much as the Italians. Similarly, in 1998, Americans were 15 percent more likely to volunteer their time than the Dutch, 21 percent more likely than the Swiss, and 32 percent more likely than the Germans. These differences are not attributable to demographic characteristics such as education, income, age, sex, or marital status. On the contrary, if we look at two people who are identical in all these ways except that one is European and the other American, the probability is still far lower that the European will volunteer than the American.

(From here)

You might also be interested in several of the statistics from this site, too. Notably, in 2006, US charitable giving as a percentage of GDP was larger by more than a factor of two than the second most charitable nation (the UK).

No, not true at all. The problem was that the risk was misunderstood. That's the direct result of thousands of differing "homebrewed" financial instruments, none of which got very much analyst attention. This is why most commodities trade only in standardized contracts, and all trades are themseles public (at least price and quantity) - the arbitrage profit to be made from understanding the standardized contract better than the other guy is so vast that they are understood perfectly. That level of analysis would have prevented the problems we saw.

On futures, derivitives, and speculators in general, they really help stabilize prices.

DON'T HAVE TO PAY ANY TAXES?!?!?!?!?!? What planet are you from, and what genetically modified weed are you smoking?

http://blog.american.com/2011/05/now-that-it%E2%80%99s-open-season-on-big-oil-here-are-some-facts/

Please let me know if you really believe that oil companies don't pay any taxes, because that is the most absurd thing I have ever heard.

If you are going to assign corporate liabilities to the employee then it would be proper to assign the corporate income tax paid to the shareholders who own that corporation. In which case those who are paying long term capital gains taxes are paying much more than 15%.

There are several reasons that I see FICA as different. First, is because FICA strictly funds two programs (social security and medicare) and people will be receiving all of that money and then some back when they reach retirement age and begin receiving social security and participating in medicare. Second, all government accounting keeps it separate from income taxes, due to the aforementioned targeted purpose. Third, really just the other side of the coin from the second reason, the federal government is funded by the income tax (and debt -- which is paid off with income tax revenue.) And that's the concern: a smaller and smaller portion of the country is paying for everything.

It's not a matter of being bad at accounting or math. It's just reality.

Here's a few charts that illustrate the massive problems with Social Security as it is currently composed.

Garbage indeed. I've seen stats that contradict your claims. Do you have stats to support yours?

I haven't read what Buffet had to say about the tax situation for the rich, so I don't know how much he is -- or is not -- paying. However, I have read statistics that claim that the top 25% of the wealth in America pays 85% of the taxes. That stat dates from 2007, so things may have changed since then, but IF that stat is even remotely accurate, then saying, "To anyone who makes over $1M/year and claims that raising their taxes is unfair, SUCK IT UP....if you can't afford to live within yours, CHANGE YOUR LIFESTYLE." is at least somewhat over simplistic and naive.

...the rich seem to think that because they make millions, they don't have to contribute.

[Citation Needed]

In fact, I'll see your claim that the rich don't pay their share and raise you a citation of my own. If these stats are accurate, and yes, I know what they say about statistics, then the top 25% of wealth in America pays 85% of the taxes. Does that seem "fair" to YOU?

What you don't realize is that there is no such thing as "fair". "Fair" is an arbitrary concept that is only defined within the context of the one who is using the term. To those below the poverty level, it isn't "fair" that they have to pay any taxes at all, because they don't have enough money to provide for their own needs, much less to contribute to the common good. To the rich, it isn't fair that the top 25% of income in the U.S. is paying 85% of the taxes -- they (presumably) worked hard for their money, so why should they have to shoulder the burden of paying to provide goods and services for the welfare class? My own personal opinion is that there should be a flat tax -- say 25% -- across the board for everyone above the poverty level. No credits, no loopholes, just a flat tax rate that applies to everyone. But that's not "fair" either, because those just above the poverty level ($11,161 in 2009) will feel that 25% hit (or $2790.25) far more than a rich person will. However, it isn't "fair" to the rich person (someone making over $250,000 per year, per Wikipedia and dailyfinance.com) either, because a 25% tax rate lightens their pocket by $62,500 -- over 5 1/2 times the ENTIRE SALARY of a borderline poor person. Is that "fair"?

So, I'm not terribly interested in what people call "fair" because there's no such thing. If you think you can find some objective measure of what "fair" means, you are fooling yourself.

Yeah, thank goodness CA has ballot measures. Wouldn't want to be like TX!

• with that silly balanced budget amendment
• where they've added 73k jobs over the last ten years (while CA lost 60k jobs)
• with some of the lowest taxes per person nationally (49th in 2006, I don't know the current ranking)
• with a couple billion set aside in the "rainy day fund"

Check out the map on http://blog.american.com/2010/06/america-as-texas-vs-california-who%E2%80%99s-moving-where-edition/ to see what other people think... and follow it to forbes and check out how CA compares.

CA really dodged a bullet there didn't you?

We know that statistically blacks have lower IQs. Given that there is more genetic difference between different groups of blacks than there is between blacks and whites, it is reasonable to assume that this is due to environmental factors.

No, it isn't.

If there were any science showing major differences in race- perhaps I would believe it- but test and test again show that intelligence is more correlated to your parent's station in society than race.

The hell they do.

There were more fatalities in 1972 and less cars, but I guess that is a cool car. http://blog.american.com/2010/09/the-good-old-days-are-now-trickle-down-automotive-safety/ Slashdot has been invaded by garbage or propaganda submissions. Is someone getting paid for this crap?

It's also understandable why US tried to fight for copyrights so much - that's basically the only thing they produce now. Rest of the world produces actual products.

That's fiction. US manufacturing output is still far ahead of every other country. [1] [2]

Germany produces 35% more electricity than it consumes, it is a electricity exporter in Europe.

Source? Also, if it's exporting less electricity, that implies that other countries are having to generate more electricity because they're not buying it from you, and that implies burning more NG and/or Coal.

By the way, I pay 20 cents/kWh and I'm with a utility that uses renewables exclusively. I don't know where the source in Wikipedia got their numbers from.

Well, good for you on the renewable electricity. Germany also has some of the highest renewable power subsidies going, so it's probable that a lot of your electricity cost is being subsidized by your government. - requiring utilities to buy solar at 62 cents a kwh, for example.

As for the wikipedia article, I should have mentioned that the costs in the wikipedia article are in US Cents. As 1 Euro is currently $1.42 USD, that makes your .20 EU into .28 USD, or a smidge under the quoted rate, easily explained by variances in the exchange rate from the 2009 sample. The source is right in the table, even. Going to the source gives an average of .22-.24 EU a kwh for residentials for Jan 2011.

I guess this is one of those 'reality has a liberal bias' incidents. It's a statistic. Better educated individuals tend to be more liberal. As an educator, you should be well aware of this. How many of your peers share your political views?

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/are-liberals-smarter-than-conservatives -- here's one of the first things Google brought up. But this study has been done over and over with the same results: more people with college degrees are liberal than not. How can the truth be offensive?

BTW, we still don't have the references for the creation of that diagram, so it means nothing right now. Here's a great graph.

Considering that they only released a tiny fraction of the cables, and those were redacted by professional journalists from several major newspapers, I don't think there's anything in there that would even remotely qualify it under that description

Not quite.
WikiLeaks Reportedly Outs 100s of Afghan Informants

Hundreds of Afghan civilians who worked as informants for the U.S. military have been put at risk by WikiLeaks' publication of more than 90,000 classified intelligence reports which name and in many cases locate the individuals, The Times newspaper reported Wednesday.

The article says, in spite of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's claim that sensitive information had been removed from the leaked documents, that reporters scanning the reports for just a couple hours found hundreds of Afghan names mentioned as aiding the U.S.-led war effort.

One specific example cited by the paper is a report on an interview conducted by military officers of a potential Taliban defector. The militant is named, along with his father and the village in which they live.

"The leaks certainly have put in real risk and danger the lives and integrity of many Afghans," a senior official at the Afghan foreign ministry told The Times on condition of anonymity. "The U.S. is both morally and legally responsible for any harm that the leaks might cause to the individuals, particularly those who have been named. It will further limit the U.S./international access to the uncensored views of Afghans."

One former intelligence official told the paper that the Taliban could launch revenge attacks on "traitors" in the coming days.

Blood Already on Assange's Hands (and the WikiLeaks-Gitmo Connection)

It is especially interesting that Wikileaks has endangered informants against the Taliban since the Taliban are reaching into the United States to train terrorists and fund attacks:
Suspect in Times Square bombing attempt was paid by Pakistani Taliban, indictment says

Regardless of whether they've broken a world-changing story so far, they've produced a chilling effect on corruption.

It isn't so much corruption that is shut down, as American diplomatic operations. Dealing with actual corruption would require a scapel, not the blunt object of the Wikileaks releases.

Battered by a scandal which seems to provide a fresh wave of embarrassment with each passing day, the US government is being forced to undertake a major reshuffle of the embassy staff, military personnel and intelligence operatives whose work has been laid bare by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The Obama administration was yesterday facing a crisis in its diplomatic service, amid growing evidence that the ongoing publication of a tranche of supposedly-confidential communiqués will make normal work difficult, if not dangerous, for important State Department employees across the world.

"In the short run, we're almost out of business," a senior US diplomat told the Reuters news agency, saying it could take five years to rebuild trust. "It is really, really bad. I cannot exaggerate it. In all honesty, nobody wants to talk to us ... Some people still have to, particularly (in) government but ... they are already asking us things like, 'Are you going to write about this?'"

"We're going to have to pull out some of our best people – the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis – because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."

Julian Assange’s EgoLeaks
WikiLeaks’ Selective Morality

WikiLeaks Reportedly Outs 100s of Afghan Informants

... in spite of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's claim that sensitive information had been removed from the leaked documents, that reporters scanning the reports for just a couple hours found hundreds of Afghan names mentioned as aiding the U.S.-led war effort.

One specific example cited by the paper is a report on an interview conducted by military officers of a potential Taliban defector. The militant is named, along with his father and the village in which they live.

"The leaks certainly have put in real risk and danger the lives and integrity of many Afghans," a senior official at the Afghan foreign ministry told The Times on condition of anonymity. "The U.S. is both morally and legally responsible for any harm that the leaks might cause to the individuals, particularly those who have been named. It will further limit the U.S./international access to the uncensored views of Afghans."

One former intelligence official told the paper that the Taliban could launch revenge attacks on "traitors" in the coming days.

Blood Already on Assange’s Hands (and the WikiLeaks-Gitmo Connection)

California isn't a magnet for anyone these days. People are leaving the state in droves (and going to places like Texas).

http://blog.american.com/?p=15579

There's more to this than just 'high taxes = people leave.' It's a combination of taxes and the regulatory environment. Plenty of states have an income tax and that doesn't drive businesses out, though Washington is one of the few states without any income tax (along with Texas, New Hampshire, Florida, and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting) -- and that definitely does attract businesses. Pennsylvania has a small income tax - right around 3% - and nobody is going to pack up and leave over 3%, particularly when 3% is paradise next to New York and New Jersey rates.

But what you see in California and New York is a government that feels it is indispensable to all business. One good example in New York is Yoga -- you now need to be licensed by the state to run a Yoga studio. wtf? What possible interest does the state have in regulating Yoga? Or you'll see some interesting ideas, like NYC's policy of making any restaurant with more than a couple locations be required to post nutritional information for everything it sells, morph into terrible ideas like forbidding restaurants from cooking with certain fats. A big enough gov't will go overnight from requiring transparent disclosure (something most Slashdottians can probably get behind) to 'well, we really know best' and telling you how you need to run your private business.

I run a small business in a very unregulated sector (web development) but the amount of garbage you have to put up with in New York is what drove me out. It wasn't any one thing, though the taxes were terrible, the health insurance market was terrible (so highly regulated that there was almost no competition since nobody could be bothered to put up with the State running the insurance market), and the government basically looks at you like its personal piggy bank. Raise enough barriers and people will leave. It's been going on in California for years now.

Taiwan is dependent on American military protection, and are some of the most fanatical allies we have.

Also, our manufacturing output is going up. I don't know why Slashdot is obsessed with our growing worker productivity.

http://blog.american.com/?p=12330

No, they haven't. Data from a Federal Reserve report from six months ago says the same thing:

http://blog.american.com/?p=8593

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=121034 Cites a Federal Reserve Report for last November.

For the year 2008, the Federal Reserve estimates that the value of U.S. manufacturing output was about $3.7 trillion (in 2008 dollars). If the U.S. manufacturing sector were a separate economy, with its own GDP, it would be tied with Germany as the world's fourth-richest economy. The GDPs are: U.S. ($14.2 trillion), Japan ($4.9 trillion), China ($4.3 trillion), U.S. manufacturing ($3.7 trillion), Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.9 trillion) and the United Kingdom ($2.7 trillion).

More data from the same Federal Reserve report from last November:

http://blog.american.com/?p=8593

Manufacturing has seen the same changes over the last forty years that agriculture saw over the previous two hundred: Productivity per worker rose so much that fewer and fewer workers were needed to produce just as much stuff. This freed those workers to do other things, increasing the wealth of society. So manufacturing jobs have fallen--but we produce more than we ever have, and more than anyone else, including China. This is a GOOD thing, because it frees those workers to do other things, producing more goods and services for society as a whole.

You do realize no matter how big the government numbers look, the private sector (businesses, individuals, and churches) usually trumps it in spades right?

Of course just by your statement I know what side of the political fence you are on, because conservatives are much more generous than liberals as a whole, because we feel it is our duty to take care of our family first, our neighbor second, and our government third. The left believe in government taking care of us first, our families second, and our neighbors third, and using a redistributive tax to do so.

I'm not just spouting that, it's a common difference between left and right, and way of thinking, with research from both sides of the isle finding it true. If you don't like it, then perhaps you should rethink your ideology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html?_r=3
http://blog.fortiusone.com/2009/01/07/dataset-of-the-day-who-is-more-generous-republicans-or-democrats/
http://blog.american.com/?p=9220

Indeed. Globalisation makes source material cheaper for companies and end-products more expensive for consumers

You are very wrong.

The complaints against this bill have nothing to do with the spirit of it and everything to do with the structure of it. Taxes, any taxes, have distortionary economic effects. Some of these effects can be good, such as discouraging the use of carbon emitting fuels. Others are bad, such as making goods and services more expensive for consumers. Ideally, the government would enact a carbon tax and offset the tax by reducing personal income and corporate taxes proportionally. This leads to a marginal cost increase on burning fossil fuels without increasing the overall cost of goods and services to consumers and businesses.

But this is not what's happening. Instead of viewing this as an opportunity to enact beneficial legislation, our congressmen have instead opted to see it as an opportunity to increase government revenue. The pitfalls to the proposed system are numerous. As previously mentioned the first drawback is that consumers and businesses will immediately see prices on nearly all products go up. There has been discussion of granting permits to selected firms for free at the beginning. This is a fools bargain. See here for a detailed explanation why, but the net effect of such legislation is to essentially pass the proceeds from a carbon tax directly to the firms granted the permits. Not to mention that it opens up the entire system to immense potential for corruption, as permits will very likely be traded as political favors to campaign contributors, and it puts the government in the position of essentially selecting which companies to grant a massive competitive advantage to.

Yes carbon emissions and dwindling fossil fuels are serious problems, and we as a nation need to take steps to mitigate their effects. But this bill is quite possibly the worst was to do so. It incorporates nearly every unnecessary drawback to such legislation. It's a poorly written bill from top to bottom that accomplishes as little as possible. And it will pass, because the average American is too blinded by the promise of such a law to notice how absolutely terrible the details of it are, and any congressman who wants to be reelected would be a fool to vote against it.

Yes patents can be revoked. In the US anyone can file to have a patent revoked.

Falcon

Well, solar + battery + grid = 24/7 power for large values of 'grid.' However, I remember quite clearly an article by Andy Grove (past CEO of Intel) in which he argues that electricity is more or less "sticky." Meaning that it isn't portable across continental barriers, especially when these barriers involve a good bit of water.

A grid that encompasses North America is not going to do much at high noon on the other side of the world. Likewise a grid in Africa or Australia are going to be useless about 9-12 hours a day no matter how you slice it.

Family structure (or the lack thereof) has a lot to do with the educational problems. This article touches on some of the sociological issues involved. Parents who are educated generally see the need for education whereas undereducated parents may not.

Right. Those poor people and their insistence on 'cool' non-education-related activities for their kids!

It's part that part of the 'dream' to be big in something other than education. Sports is a big draw to many. I never said that parents are insisting on non-cool activities, but that they don't push kids to be educated.

Or maybe it's the fact that holding down three jobs doesn't leave as much time for "pushing education from day 1".

Cry more? If you're going to be a parent then you should have to at least put your children first. If this means working 3 jobs and then coming home and doing homework with your children instead of having 'you' time so be it. People made it work for a long time prior to now, so why can they suddenly not make it work anymore?

I'm not interested in your anecdotal evidence of a tough start life overcome by family insistence on education. That's nice, but it's not going to work as a solution for the thousands of kids currently getting screwed by the system as it stands.

And how exactly are they being screwed? Is there a school for most kids to go to? Yes. Are there teachers there? Yes. What do you suggest we do when teachers are busting their ass, but the parents offer little to no help? What about discipline problems (which from my experience is the biggest issue in 'poor' schools)? Do we let bad kids slow down the whole class? Parents show up and defend their kids instead of listening to the teacher. How can that be acceptable? I don't care what happened, when I was a kid if the teacher called the house I would screwed. Surprise, no discipline problems.

The system isn't perfect, but you can't put all or even most of the blame on the system itself. People have to step up and take some responsibility for themselves and their kids.

we're in a financial crisis created by the rich, for the rich.

far be it from me to defend Bush, but his administration offered up legislation 12 times to reform/regulate fannie mae source (and be brave, don't stop reading just because it shatters your preconceived notions)

Shouldn't the rich - those making over $250,000 per year - cough up a little?

I don't know, why don't you provide a source showing how much they're paying now? How can you possibly have an informed answer to that decision if you don't even know how much they're paying now? Surely your opinions aren't based on ignorance... right? Here's a source to get you started in your self-education (and be brave, don't stop reading because it shatters your preconceived notions)

I actually give a damn about the people around me who didn't get lucky enough to land in a high paying profession with benefits.

some people got lucky, but I stayed up late at night studying. I have friends who partied and flunked out. Please explain to me why I should be forced to give my lazy friends anything. I'm not suggesting that I'm against universal healthcare, I'm simply asking you to moderate your opinion with the recognition that some people are poor because of choices that they made, and it's not fair for your to post as if everyone who worked hard and got a good job is simply lucky.

those who are most able to pay handover less than a family of four living off of 40k

Do you really believe that's true? You should take a look at this:
http://www.american.com/archive/2007/november-december-magazine-contents/guess-who-really-pays-the-taxes

I'm not sure who you mean by, "those most able to pay" but if you mean the top 1% of income earners, they make a lot of money, no doubt about that, but they pay a larger percentage of taxes than the percentage of income they earn. They make 20% of income and pay 40% of taxes. You may not think that's enough. I'm willing to debate that, but it's certain not the way you described it.

the issues involved are to some degree subjective...

I would tend to disagree, some of the issues are subjective while a lot of issues have pretty good and very technical mathematical models to back up a lot of conclusions. Here is a recent paragraph from an article dealing with the bailout that describes the suits vs geeks relationship:

"Harvard finance professor Robert Merton, a Nobel laureate, notes that one of the problems at large financial institutions is the gap between the executives and the financial engineers, or what I call the "suits" and the "geeks." The geeks possess knowledge that is highly specialized and extremely technical. Many suits have never even taken a course in the fundamentals of valuing complex financial instruments, even though the health of their firms depends crucially on that very issue.

Today, the suits are saying that mortgage-backed securities are undervalued, and that if the government just holds them to maturity it will make a profit. But the geeks will tell you that we cannot be certain these securities are undervalued."

I haven't studied Krugman's work, but I believe it is pretty technical in nature, and if he didn't quite deserve a Nobel based solely on his work, from what I've read it is still top notch. By the way this was written by someone who generally disagrees with a lot of Krugman's NY times columns.

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/october-10-08/main-street-vs-wall-street

Linking to a Debra Rolison search isn't nearly enough. She's an advocate and a very good scientist, but she doesn't actually study gender disparity. Post the data. The studies I've heard about have been discredited due to things like "the data getting lost" and adjectives like "possible" turning into "actual" due to some mistake. The data is far less than "copious" that girls are being singled out and discouraged from being physicists.

I would love to have more women working with me (I'm also a physicist). How are quotas going to do that, when we can't recruit women into advanced physics degrees when outreach in middle school, extra funding and administrative support hasn't done it? Really, what do we do? Force them? Hire a biologist and call her a physicist? Your suggestion elsewhere of forced retirements is good, if cold and heartless. Maybe we could go further and just fire every other male professor? Would that really change the culture, or just piss people off and encourage the awful idea that women need some help if they're to compete with men in physics.

The people who know what they're talking about know that the culture of physics has to change. It's not just something easy like "stop being mean to girls."

The schooling is long, you don't get paid well at all, and you have to compete for any scraps of money that may be available. The fight for funding is such that there is enormous pressure to get rid of any student/postdoc/junior faculty who may not make it. Why would anyone want to do this? We can't get enough qualified people from the US to fill open positions. So it's useful for potential immigrants. The rest of us would do it for free if we had to.

As a male, I've had professors tell me I didn't belong in physics, didn't belong in grad school and that I was expected to work 13 out of every 14 days (but only get paid for 20 hours a week). I had one professor tell me I was going to fail his class, and then he gave me an A when I didn't wilt. Most of my classmates didn't fare so well and quit under the pressure. Of the 20 people who started with me in my degree program, 4 have or will get a PhD from the program (true to the statistics, the survivors are 25% women). That's the kind of thing that needs to stop, but it shouldn't stop just for women. You've been through this! Did you feel bad for only the women who were sent crying from the department offices?

We need what biology had a decade ago to get to equality: a good reason to do this. Biology did that by doubling the available funding over the course of 10 years. If departments aren't breaking the budget to keep one more student, there will be less pressure to force out anyone who doesn't desperately want to do physics. That means less abuse, less intense competition and a culture which may not be toxic to women. (It also means a crisis when the funding stops going up, which you see in biology today, but which hasn't hurt gender equality.) Double the funding and put in the quotas, but my guess is you wouldn't need the quotas.

I don't have the time to vet the claims of this article, but it seems that the 'statistics' of claimed discrimination are BS..

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man

Its pretty well established that "the Rich" pay an overwhelming proportion of the tax bill - the top 10% of people pay about 70%....so in response to your statement, how exactly are you making the rich richer ?

If you want to say that those with a soul must agree with you, you may want to get some facts straight first.

70% of what? Total federal tax revenues? A persons income? Tax revenues by that bracket only? When you denote a percentage bracket, is the demarcation between brackets linear, probabilistic, or something else (in other words, does the top 1% represent all incomes over $100,000.00, or over $100,000,000.00)? Just how many people are represented in this graph?

If I read the graph one way - to say that it's a percentage of income for a specific bracket - then the graph is incorrect, but if I read it another way - that the percentage is for the bracket it is in plus all of the other brackets above it, that is to say for all "remaining" income brackets combined, then why do the middle brackets get better "breaks" than the 25% and top 1%? Why are we using 2004 figures when the IRS collects data every tax year (see the fine print in the graph)?

This data isn't terribly clear. Anyone else have a slightly newer, much clearer view, one that breaks income brackets down nicely by tax bracket AND cross-references the number of people in that bracket AND cross-references the low, median, and high incomes in those brackets? Are we strictly talking dollars here or people and money?

If the rich are being taxed disproportionately, then they do they fight so hard to AVOID a flat tax, which would be equal for all taxpayers that exceed a minimum threshold for income? After all, if this data is correct, and they are paying 19% of income into tax, then having their tax rate reduced to a flat 15% would a boon, would it not?

Why is it that the top income brackets don't pay AMT, yet the "middle class" pays it more and more?

Why do the top brackets have an opportunity to write off tax shelters that are not available to brackets below them? Telling me that the market price for tax-shelter investments is a non-issue (and therefore should not be brought up) is like saying it's easy for anyone making less than $5,000 yearly to loose a loaf of bread, just go visit the store and get another loaf, it's not like you needed that money for something else...

I guess the short of what I am saying is: there are some specious arguments based on incomplete samples of data being given. If I can disprove the argument without the need for hard data, then is there an issue with the logic (in which case, please explain the missing or erroneous logic in detail), or there an issue with the data (in which case, the figures you are giving are pretty much hot air, look elsewhere for better data before presenting it).

Its pretty well established that "the Rich" pay an overwhelming proportion of the tax bill - the top 10% of people pay about 70%....so in response to your statement, how exactly are you making the rich richer ?

If you want to say that those with a soul must agree with you, you may want to get some facts straight first.

> after our history teaches

not much, i'm afraid:-(

> GW (with all the fud put out by oil companies

or al gore...and i just ran across this:

"using satellite data combined with a small model, Spencer finds that
changes in cloudiness appear to drive changes in temperature. If this is
so, Spencer suggests, this means that models have fundamentally mixed up
cause and effect."

http://reason.com/news/show/125323.html

> It is religious groups that are killing America. Hopefully we bounce back from it.

or secular religionistas:

"While Title IX has been effective in promoting women's participation in
sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to
the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of
Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title
IX to mean that women are entitled to "statistical proportionality."
That is to say, if a college's student body is 60 percent female, then
60 percent of the athletes should be female--even if far fewer women than
men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic
directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as
men. To avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits,
they have simply eliminated men's teams. Although there are many factors
affecting the evolution of men's and women's college sports, there is no
question that Title IX has led to men's participation being calibrated
to the level of women's interest. That kind of calibration could
devastate academic science."

http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-contents/why-can2019t-a-woman-be-more-like-a-man

The real problem is this idea that we cannot acknowledge the fact that some kids are genuinely better than others. Worse is getting past the idea that hard work really does pay off.

You might find this worth a read in considering the future of science in the US.