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Actually, that is right. But you can understand if you study a little. Which is a more controlled study, particle physics experiments or experiments done on groups of people? It's a no-brainer. Years ago they tried to scare us about power lines, only to find out the guy fudged his data. So 100's of studies say no, and one more crackpot says "Hey... here's a link!!" and now we should all start running. The nice thing about science is the results are repeatable; I can go check for myself. I have checked e-m radiation theory and it checks out.

Uh ok. First of all, please show us the numbers. Of course if, as you say, it depends on the numbers you use, then maybe you can prove anything. But just for the fun of it, try comparing two similar and bordering nations like, say, the USA and Canada. See what you come up with. And by the way, I'd much rather be attacked by a kid with a knife than a kid with a gun. There's a reason why there's not much knife regulations: it's much easier to kill with a gun than a knife.

Well, I did a quick Google search, and here are just a few links:
http://www.haciendapub.com/stolinsky.html
http://www.ncpa.org/pi/crime/crime21.html
http://www.jpfo.org/data-docs.htm

But then again, as I said, there are rather varying numbers on the subject. Kinda like eggs. There's always a study every two months about how eggs are good for you, but they're bad, but they're also good. Personally, I think our gun control laws are pretty good as they are, but could certainly due to at least have a bit more strictness to it. If I were actually making the policy I'd probably like to better review the laws and the statictics, as well as more theories about how they affect eachother, but I don't have the time, so I can only make vague generalizations.

Only 15% of the country voted for him

Well, more like 20%. Of course, only 40% voted. And yeah, that does actually suck. It'd be nice if more people voted. Well, I shouldn't talk, because I didn't vote due to my bizarre political beliefs, but I think that the 60% who didn't vote were just too lazy/apathetic to do so. Well, I guess it makes sense, then, that his job approval ratings are near around the percent of the population who voted for him! As for myself, I don't really like the president too much. He does things that I agree with (i.e. staying in Iraq; I agree that the war was on shaky moral ground, but I think that leaving now would be doing more of a disservice to the Iraqis...), but I'm becoming increasingly fed up with his bullshit (I once had high hopes for his second term, where he'd be less of a Republican ass, but not so much; for example, he keeps talking about "alternative energy", but I see nothing happening. And his in-ability to veto a single spending bill makes me wonder...)

99% of Americans ARE voting for him everyday by letting him in power.

I keep hearing that Americans need to "overthrow" the government on this thread, but how are we suppose to do this without guns? But that aside, what makes you think that the resulting government would be any better, especially how crazy the American people are/are percieved? No offense, but I doubt that will work. But there's good news on the horizon: based on Bush's poor ratings, there's expected to be in a backlash in the 2006 Congressional elections, leading to a Democratic congress and a Republican presidency. Kinda like a reversed version of the Clinton era. Personally, I think that the balance will make for better policy over the next two years.

Mod me down all you want. That doesn't change the fact that, in reality, despite what CNN and Fox might say, Americans are seen as a bunch of morons pretty much everywhere. Don't blame me, that's just the way it is and will be until you show some common sense.

I agree with you in general, if not in the specifics. Whether we deserve it or not we are percieved rather poorly overseas. Hell, we're often poorly percieved in our own country. I think a fair amount of this in undeserved (we're the only remaining superpower, so we're bound to be a target; plus, anti-american sentiment has alot of historical roots), but yes, there is alot of stupid things that America, as a people AND as a government, do. Hopefully in the future things will get better.

In some states, owners of private property are allowed the choice of whether to forbid CCW holders from carrying in their buildings. This is done by posting signs on the entrance.

Thing is, in such areas, businesses that post suffer a higher crime rate than those that don't. The reason can be very simple. How many criminals are going to view the signs as anything other than 'Come on in, We're Unarmed, so we can't shoot back!'?

10 Stores that posted are robbed
New York residents place 'No guns in this House' signs, suffered robbery/burglury spree. Oh, and during a police strike in Albuquerque, armed citizens patrolled during police strike and felonies dropped sharply.
Criminals don't seem to mind No-Gun signs in Ohio
Lengthy article Texas's CCW laws, includes posting

A good reference for CCW and other gun laws in the USA
A collection of interesting statistics

Despite all this noise about peak oil, oil futures remain reasonable, and oil prices are coming down in light of new supplies, suggesting that our access to oil isn't nearly as stripped as doomsayers want us to believe.

China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.

If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.

But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?

It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.

I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system.

To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years.

Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.

Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.

Climate Change is the change in the climate over a period of thousands of years to centuries here is just one link of the thousands out there. http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba230.html

This post does not mean that I buy the gloom and doom scenarios put out by those who warn of global warming, nor do I reject them (I do not think the climate is understood very muchat all) - I believe in clean energy, preferably for now, nuclear and wind power.

I believe in pollution being a problem, but to think that the activities of people or volcanism is more important than the activity of the sun or the earth's magnetosphere is really not very smart in understanding the Earth's climate.

Recently, Mars has been observed warming up.

Lets say everyone (including those in Russia, India and China which will *never* happen) go to 100% clean existence and we regress to simpler medieval times sustenance farming and making the Sierra Club happy is the new religion and then the earth CONTINUES to get warm, then we are in a real pickle - no technology to try and bail out the human race and the same problem as before.

http://www.ncpa.org/newdpd/dpdarticle.php?article_ id=2736

MARS IS WARMING
Daily Policy Digest
GLOBAL WARMING
Tuesday, January 10, 2006

The planet Mars is undergoing significant global warming which supports many climatologists' claims that the Earth's modest warming during the past century is due to a recent upsurge in solar energy, says James M. Taylor, of the Heartland Institute.

For three Mars summers, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near the planet's south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress, says Taylor. Furthermore, documented changes from 1999 to 2005 show that Mars' climate is presently warmer, and perhaps getting warmer still, than it was several decades or centuries ago.

But there are not a lot of anthropogenic gas emissions on Mars, so what internal dynamic is warming the planet and what does it mean for Earth? According to researchers:

At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities.
The problem is that Earth's atmosphere is not in thermodynamic equilibrium with the sun; the longer the time period that the Earth is not in thermodynamic equilibrium, the stronger the effect will be on the atmosphere.
Therefore, greenhouse gases would still contribute to warming, but not as strongly as once thought.
Furthermore, the warming of Mars adds another level of uncertainty to claims that the Earth's modest recent warming is a result of human activity, says Taylor.

Source: James M. Taylor, "Mars Is Warming, NASA Scientists Report," Environment and Climate News: Heartland Institute, November 2005.

Oh. To add to this. There is a big difference between roof area and usable roof area.
On most houses, you need a south facing roof to make it usable at all.
Add to this the need for additional area to make up for the loss in efficiency
if the solar panel is not movable (most roof mounts aren't) even if it is on a south-facing roof.

On my home, the usable south-facing roof surface (shooing off some birds and cutting down a couple of trees)
is ~3m by ~15m on the main south facing roof.
Say 50m squared of roof surface, to be generous.

The cleanest, most environmentally friendly form of adequate power that exists at this moment is
nuclear. And nuclear "waste" is only due to stupid paranoia in this country.
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/bud/pd112801b.html

If you have enough radioactivity to be dangerous over an extended period of time, you have enough
low-grade power for a useful, compact, energy source.

And if anyone brings up the idiotic paranoia about recycling "contaminated" metals from containers
into other metal items, smack them. Some of these fools forget there is continuous
low-grade radiation all around us. Where do they think the radioactive materials came from in the
first place?

Then, for a 2000-hour work year, we'd all make at least one million dollars a year and we'd all be rich.

Lordy, we all be millionaires!!!!

Feel stupid now, dumbass? You should.

Raising the minimum wage doesn't make an employee more valuable to an employer. Quite the opposite. Because if a low/no-skill worker isn't worth more to an employer than what he's paid, that low/no-skill worker will remain unemployed.

Read here how increases in the unemployment rate of black teenages correlates exactly with increases in the minimum wage.

uhhh, no?

While over-consumption of most natural resources will likely lead to the eventual death of all species who depend on those resources, running out of oil and uranium will not. Further, while it is also true that the waste produced by over-consumation is often toxic, the amount of waste produced by uranium and oil used in electricity production is not a significant danger.

Ironically, it is the so-called environmentalists who are forcing electric power companies to use more wasteful technologies to meet a rapidly increasing demand for electric power. The use of nuclear power produces zero emissions, and recycleable waste.

Equally ironic is that it was Jimmy Carter, with the aid of Gerald Ford, who prevented US companies from recycling their nuclear waste by executive order in 1979, but while Ronald Reagan lifted the ban in 1981, there is still grassroots opposition to both new reactors and spent fuel recycling. This opposition makes little logical sense given the fact that nuclear reactors are a zero-emmisions technology (I don't think they had ionizing radition in mind when they coined that term.) and even without recycling, a relatively small amount of spent fuel has been created in the first place. In the last 40 years the total amount of commercial spent fuel would fill an American football field to a dept of 5 yards.

The sad fact is, that we should be building nukes all over the US, and enjoying cheap plentiful electricity throughout the country. While doing this we should be closing down coal and oil fired power plants. This would, of course, cut green house emissions, which I don't much care about, but more importantly, it would cut pollutants in the atmosphere which I, and most other people, care about very much. A by product may also be the closure of natural gas fired electric power plants which, hopefully, would decrease industrial demand, and cause prices to fall for consumers.

Coward:

Really?

A study conducted by University of Kentucky labor and health economist Dr. Aaron Yelowitz

Some grain of salt studies:
Government study so take it for what it is

another study

Note that nothing a government offers is truly free, even in the case here where the hardware is mostly donated.

Government-run programs are generally maintained by unionized public workers. These programs have little competition and often cost more than a private competitive market (note municipal water reclamation costs).

The city mentions they'll outsource the program to private companies, but do you believe these companies won't be owned by cronies? Even New Orleans has their own version of Haliburton.

Is providing Internet access ever a city's responsible? In my town we have 3 city-wide free WiFi providers and 20 local "coffee shop" providers. I don't see why New Orleans feels that they're needing a taxpayer funded ISP when what they really need is a tax hiatus to bring businesses and entrepreneurs to LA to create jobs and better lives that jobs help to build.

The hurricane damage is evidence to me of the decay of government projects and the wasted taxpayer money. That money would produce a safer city with more jobs if it was left to the citizens.

I call bullshit. The supreme court doesn't review state law - they took this case because the defendants claimed the state was violating the constitutional protection of property. The constituion only allows emminent domain for public *use*.

Too bad the supremes got this one so wrong. In case you haven't heard, the latest development in this case is that the homeowners who fought the seizure are being charged back-rent to 2000, when the case first started. They are also only being offered compensation for their property based on 2000 values. Seems like the town (and the developers that paid off [err.. I mean, influenced] the town leaders) want the land for free.

Government agencies are definitely not poor, with enough support in Congress they can have a near unlimited budget. It's the efficiency of a government agency versus a free market that comes in to question. See history for examples

Sweden is the place where there was forced sterilisation until quite recently? Oh yes, I can see how an ID card might be useful there. I bet it made the eugenics program run like clockwork.

Twit.

There are no solid conclusions among all scientist on the effects of global warming. You can look here, here, here, and here to see the lack of consensus on this subject among scientists.

This is nothing more that a main stream media hype of one guys opinion to try to invoke fear in the general population.

Anyone can single out and focus on one area of the planet for a 100 year period in the Earth's history and come to a conclusion that would sound devastating if it really did apply to the whole planet for a longer period of time.

Not necessarily. A lot of the rise in violent crime is credited to increases in drunk pub violence and mobile phone robbery.

Before guns were outlawed, perps couldn't be sure that their intended victims were defenseless.

Now they can.

Perps now feel safe to commit more crimes.

In the United States, violent crime rates have declined in states where concealed carry has been legalized.

New Jersey adopted what sponsors described as "the most stringent gun law" in the nation in 1966; two years later, the murder rate was up 46 percent and the reported robbery rate had nearly doubled.

In 1968, Hawaii imposed a series of increasingly harsh measures and its murder rate, then a low 2.4 per 100,000 per year, tripled to 7.2 by 1977.

In 1976, Washington, D.C., enacted one of the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. Since then, the city's murder rate has risen 134 percent while the national murder rate has dropped 2 percent.

I do not complain, I stated a fact. The links were not in front of me, and after reading said links, all I saw were 2 charts, with no analysis. If you read the responses to the link http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=145518&cid=121 87185 you'll find that the comment is worthless, and if you check http://www.corporatism.netfirms.com/pay.htm#int visually, it's easy to see the correlation, furthermore, here are some links to show you how the minimum wage is harmful to employees in a free market system. http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2005/050143.htm http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa106.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage http://www.ncpa.org/hotlines/min/pd082100a.html
Let me guess, you're a democrat who's still whining about how your party has no ideas besides we're not republicans. Here's a joke for you:
A Republican and a Democrat were walking down the street when they came to a homeless person. The Republican gave the homeless person his Businesscard and told him to come to his office for a job. He then took 20 bucks out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless guy. The Democrat was very impressed , and when they came to another homeless person , he decided to help. He walked over to the homeless guy and gave him directions to the welfare office. He then reached into the Republicans pocket and gave the homeless person 50 bucks. Now you understand the difference between Democrats and Republicans.

Numbers are here
These numbers are from 94/98 and are the latest from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics. Rate is reflected in the number of divorces per thousand.
Here is a recent article in the Boston globe comparing Mass. to the red states.
And here is an article focusing on the reasons for the high divorce rate in the Bible belt. Spoiler: Red States are under-educated.

I suppose one could argue that the US philosophy towards business - letting the marketplace (and the courts) decide things rather than mandating via legislation - tends to encourage this sort of thing.

Please read about nuclear reprocessing:
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/bud/pd112801b.html

http://www.ncpa.org/iss/bud/pd112801b.html
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jun99/9288629 30.Ph.r.html
http://www.atomicinsights.com/apr95/waste_myth.htm l
http://www.nmcco.com/education/facts/waste/waste_h ome.htm
how's that?

Why yes, I believe he was.

How come when Bush proposes changing it, it's a BadThing, but when a Democrat says the same thing, it's a GoodThing?

Well, after hitting google briefly, I found this:
http://www.ncpa.org/iss/ant/1999/pd041299h.html

But again, having a monopoly (or being declared to have one, as in the case of MS) in and of itself is not illegal, but has a larger (legal) burden to not abuse its position.

http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s221.html

I should know, I never could get work as a physicist:-( There are other analyses that say a hydrogen economy is a daydream. you still have to GET the energy from some where If that is to be done without further burning of fossil fuels, we have to commandeer a huge amount of land for solar and wind farms and those are political and financial undertakings that are NOT an easy sell. Especially when the biggest fossil burning country reneges on Kyoto accords and is run by former president and vice president of oil or oil services companies.

I don't believe that a correlation, let alone causation link, between fossil fuel consumption and hurricanes, floods, and droughts has ever been proven.

It makes for amusing billboards, I will give you.

Good post. I want to help, but it'll have to wait until the weekend. There's a problem with keeping the answers sufficiently informative (links to sources), and still short and readable enough for these people to actually read them.

A bit sad that the first hit for 'global warmings myths' on Google at the moment points to http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba230.html, a page of (I think) a lobby group explaining giving some of those "objections" you list...

Perhaps setup a Wiki somewhere?

Much of the debate is centred around Michael Mann's hockey stick hypothesis. It suggests that the earth's temperature indeed was significantly higher during the last century than in the last one thousand years. Hence the hockey stick image.
UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recognises this image as conventional wisdom.
However, there is scientific evidence that Mann's estimates could be wrong: See Breaking the Hockey Stick, suggesting that global warming may be a natural phenomena.

You sound like a well intended individual, it's just unfortunate that all your good intentions have bad consequences. Point by point:

the platform they advocate and realize its concentrated Big Business Republican
No, take the power away from government to regulate and aid business, and you're left with more small businesses.

Sell National Reserves and Parks to private owners
The largest polluter in this country is the federal government. People who own private land take better care of it because they have a greater interest in it

Make pollution a civil offense?
Right now you're prevented from suing polluters because they lobby the federal government into passing laws so that it's not even a civil offence

Eliminating the minimum wage really isn't as drastic as it seems, except for those immigrants that Badnarik claims are vital to American prosperity
The minimum wage causes unemployment. People can choose where they want to work, and if they wish to seek a greater wage.

How about you quit spending all your time letting politicians run your life and worry about yourself. You will find that it's better for everyone if you worry about yourself, and not everyone else. Any time you give the government the power to do good, that power will eventually be used to do evil. The problem is not the corruption of power, rather the power to corrupt. - Michael Cloud

Everyone complains about companies outsourcing, but has anyone ever see any actual studies on Insourcing vs. Outsourcing? From my browsing around it looks to me like it's actually more beneficial to the economy.

We insource a LOT more than we outsource: "The U.S. Department of Commerce reports that, in 2003, the United States bought $77.38 billion in services from foreign countries and sold $131.01 billion to them" and "according to the McKinsey Global Institute, for every $1 outsourced, the economic gain to the United States as a whole is $1.12 to $1.14"

Can anyone find a link with some good info on the evils of outsourcing?

quoted text from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba480/

For the sake of you, I hope you won't.

Take a look how more than 2000 windmills destroyed the formerly pristine hills around Tarifa in Spain: http://www.tarifaspain.com/Windmills2.jpg. 50 km2 of spoiled vistas. As a bonus, they kill a lot of migrating birds who cross the Gibraltar strait between Europe and Africa twice a year: http://www.ncpa.org/prs/tst/20040501hsburnett.htm. All this for a relatively minute quantity of unreliable energy.

While more and more (> 10%) seem to be under repair each time I pass, at least the remaining mills seem to be operational most of the time there due to the unique wind conditions there. Most windmills I've seen in other places were simply standing still.

Windmills are mainly used as an pacifying excuse. But then, the populace is generally far too stupid to understand how utterly tiny the wind power potential really is.

Where the money during the goldrush was made selling shovels, I think that in this case, it's made by construction companies raking in subsidies. I predict those mills being abandoned in the next decade, when maintenance costs go through the roof.

The facts are simple: The tax decreases went primarily to the rich. When taxes go up (and they have to, to cover the Bush deficit), who's going to pay? Just google for "President Bush responds that the rich have accountants who can help them avoid taxes" The poor can't pay. The rich won't pay. So who's left to absorb the increase, if not the middle class?

you are acrediting somethign that didn't happen as if it already did. Worse yet you are also blaming parties that havn't made any action towards your assumption because of you ideolog. History has shown us that an eventuality of tax cut is alway an increase in tax revenue. How long it will take or and how much are the only variable factors. This is not raising anyones taxes either. If the increased tax revenue doesn't come soon enough or with enough amounts then the tax cuts would be repealed. I bet your not even considering the fact that bushes tax cut havn't even taken efect completly yet have you? There are certain factors that have to be present for the remaining tax cuts to become a reality. If we are in a recession then they won't materialize. If there is so much of a deficate then the remaing tax cuts won't become real. And about the acountaNTS, right now the laws saw you are supposed to file your taxes the way it requires you to pay the least amount. So what is wrong with acountants looking for tax structure in transactions? You could do just then same as they do. BTW , Acountants don't cost all that much either.

Again, there are many insurance policies availible that are both afordable and availible. Granted, most are either har der to get if you have an existing medical condition or you have a period of time you have to wait before they cover that condition. If the condition is life threatening or stops you from working, then there is a government programs availible to help. I know a guy who just tore his knee cap out. He had it fixed/replaced and was back to work in about 6 months. BTW, he had no insurance of his own, didn't loose his home, and drew a paycheck from the government while he was off. No it wasn't a worker comp situation either.

If the system is broke, then a universal care program will break it more. here is an article i found that was linked from the news page in your post. It basicaly say that in countries with socialized medicin, the quality of care/life drops. I'm sure there is as much bias pushing a cause here as there is in the articles you pushed but in the middle we will find the real story. The system isn't broke, people are just not using it.

As for the study on racism, they controlled for all factors and still found blacks were 3.9 times more likely to get the death penalty in the same circumstances.

No, they found that in philly, 3.9 times as many murderers that matched the criteria for the death penalty were black. As i explained earlier, in PA. to get the death penalty you must commit first degree murder and then qualify on at least one of the 10 pieces of criterial then you get the death penalty by default. You don't have a judge giving it to you, you don't have a jurry giving it to you, if somethign you did when commiting the murder, matches somehtign they have on a list, you automaticaly get the death penalty. You cannot adjust for that It is manditory. Do you understand that when they sates say if this is true and this is true, you will get the deathpenalty. (BTW being black isn't part of the requirements) You have a study that put numbers together without any understanding of what they means to advance a cause. They know that other won't know what they mean and believe anythign thay say about it. You fell for it and i'm sure a bunch of others did too.

And once again the kethup thing didn't pass. And you are still trying to act as if it did. It doesn't matter why it didn't pass, or why you think it didn't pass, you try to claim it as a

regardless of the article's merits, he does link to a good page on the underground economy that is well researched and presented.

Minimum wage increases unemployment. This is a fact and is not debatable. How then would you collect more taxes from less people working?

Yet another Slashdot 'expert'! You get your doctorate out of a cracker jack box?

Point by point:

I don't know what country you're from, but around here, multimillionaire corporate executives are not in the habit of buying groceries at the corner store, shopping with the plebeians at Wal-Mart, or hunkering down in a common park.

No, they buy Ralph Lauren clothes from local stores, Cadillac or Lincoln limousines (or an occasional Mercedes built in Arkansas), build fabulous houses using local labor, have local design firms decorate them with furniture from the Carolinas, have hired servants shop at the local market for them, et cetera -- all of which requires spending money in the US. Sure they import things, but American importers, shipping companies, brokers, et cetera manage to make a buck there, and the cycle continues. Even flying to Europe keeps US pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendants, cab drivers, janitors, toll takers, road workers, aircraft mechanics, airport vendors, and aircraft companies with their myriad employees in business.

they very much tend to horde the majority of their money

IIRC, hoarding is illegal (I assume you mean 'hoard ' and not 'horde'). The only way to actually hoard your money would be to buy a giant vault Scrooge McDuck style. In actuality, the incredibly wealthy wind up investing in companies or venture capital firms, where it goes to pay salaries at internet startups, or at the very least, by putting their money in the bank, which then gets invested by the bank in home mortgages, which buy houses built by local labor, or business loans which pay salaries. Either way, someone winds up with that money. The only thing the rich people get is more stuff, which had to be paid for, which allowed someone to pay the rent.

all payed for by tax dollars that are shouldered largely not by this highly strange executive of yours

You really need to get your facts straight. The top 1% of wage earners pay out over 30% of the total tax burden. The top 20% of wage earners pay over 80% of the total tax burden. Link here. Often, due to the Earned Income Tax Credit, the poorest tax payers actually have a negative tax rate due to the Earned Income Tax Credit (that one came in handy when I was in college).


I'd suggest, then, that you spend less time idealizing things in terms of this poor approximation of macroeconomics that is the 'trickle-down' theory, and more time thinking about how things tend to play out in the real world.

And I'd suggest learning something about a subject before you go spewing out flawed pseudo-academic dreck. To Wikipedia with you!

I don't mean to be insensitive to the topic of child abuse, but I have nagging suspicion that all the discussion about this book borders on pandering to people's fears. I've heard that statistics say most abused children are more likely to be abused by someone they know rather than complete strangers. The media has a tendency to propagate fear of the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

I can't find a link to information on it, but I recall seeing a report on how statistics proved that the topic of deaths from the drug ecstasy was exhaggerated in the UK media, when they were actually rare and paled in comparison to something that resulted in many more deaths; falling in the shower! Yet no mention was made of this in the media, nor were there any measures taken to do things like enforce safer shower designs. Ecstasy was just more eye-catching as a news item.

The author of the book, Katie Tarbox seems to be turning this into a career- she actually has a company, Katie Tarbox, Inc., and even plans to launch a school curriculum. Her lawyer, Parry Aftab, seems to be revelling in the spotlight, touting herself as "The Angel of the Internet" and boasting about her media appearances; "She regularly appears on national and international television, in national, international and regional news publications and in both business and mass market publications around the world. She has been featured in Readers Digest, People Magazine, TV Guide, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Biography Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Seventeen, Family Circle and Ladies Home Journal, among others". Yet this is the very same woman who called Katie Jones, the owner of the Katie.com domain name and threatened that "things would only get worse" if she didn't freely hand over the domain name- and Jones had just given birth only a week before. The lawyer also spread defamatory remarks about Jones, claiming that Jones had a hidden agenda. Tarbox claims that Aftab doesn't represent her but represents her publisher, Penguin, yet there is a lot of evidence to the contrary.

All this media hype, aggressive legal action, PR damage control, and not to mention incorporation, all have the trademark characteristics of a profitable business. If this was an effort focused more on social change and education, the controversies surrounding the book would have been resolved long ago rather than having escalated to this point. There is always the danger of children coming into contact with pedophiles through the internet, but how does this statistically compare to things like the murder rate for children? What about the institutionalised rapes of women in Somalia? Why focus on this topic? Is it about reality, or is it more about pandering to the tabloid psyche?

OK, I googled it. According to some of the results, the top 1% pay about a third. The top 5% pay a bit more than half.

Is someone "getting off light"? I don't know...Assuming you're remembering that statistic right, I suppose it would depend on what "control over 90% of the wealth" means. It doesn't sound like just income or taxable property to me. The owner of a factory or software company probably "controls" a heck of a lot more "wealth" than a factor worker, but the applicable taxes won't necessarily reflect that.

Lets assume I spend 100's of millions developing a new car? get it? also, what you say doesn't reflect reality - most big patent money is spent on marketing not R&D.

You couldn't be more wrong:

On average, it now takes $802 million, including the cost of capital, to come up with a new pharmaceutical product.

The study found that the average development time for new medicines is 12 years.

In the 1990s, drug firms spent an average of $121 million out-of-pocket in research prior to clinical trials -- but that figure rises to $336 million when the costs of capital are included. The clinical testing stage consumes $282 million -- or $466 million when capital costs are factored in.

OK, we get it: you don't like patents. But please, don't let your silly ideology blind you to the fact that the original poster was talking about: it costs lots of money to develop new drugs, and without patents to AT LEAST ensure that the developer can recoup his hundreds of millions of dollars, there will be NO incentive to develop new drugs. After all, why should he when someone else can just copy the work of someone who did all the R&D and offer the drug at a low price right away?

In our system, most businesses fail.

Business is a high-risk venture. Always has been. And that's why...

Most wealth is horded by the top few percentiles.

Higher risks mean higher reward. As the British SAS say, "those who dare, win."

Those who have dared, are most-likely to win. They are the most-likely to have the most money. Some people bet their net worth on a company, ony to go broke. Others become billionaires.

Such is the case in a dynamic, capitalist society. There are no guarantees except the promise of being able to take risk yourself, hoping that you too may strike it rich.

For the majority, most real incomes have been stagnant since the 1960s.

These folks say real income rose - even for the poorest 20% - by 12.9% between 1982-1989. Other time periods have risen less, true, but the point is that real incomes are rising.

Are they rising as much as the 530% rise for the executive class? Clearly not. That's where thrift-minded, cost-cutting, efficiency-zealot shareholder activists need to come into play in publicly-traded companies, realizing that executives are too much of a drain on profits and need to either take a pay cut or take a hike.

Our communities and workforces have been devastated by two decades of rapacious mergers, corporate accounting scams, and stock inflation.

Walmart's done a good bit to run small business out of business, yes.

Mergers? Perhaps, although the biggest merger of them all -- AOL/Time-Warner -- has been an utter dud the last few years, with talk of even breaking up again! Hasn't happened yet though.

Millions upon millions of Americans have no health care.

Those that do, get it promptly however. In other countries (Canada, France, etc.) you have to wait perhaps 3 months or more for medical service.

Consider the problem of the "Tragedy of the Commons." That is, if everybody had "FREE! click here!! FREE! click here!! FREE!!!" healthcare, the number of people seeing the doctor would rise, because there's no incentive *not* to go to the doctor. There's no incentive *not* to use that "FREE!," now-communal resource known as a Medical Doctor...

That sort of system leads to the problems found in Canada and France. A better system, IMO, would be for government-sponsored "catastrophe" healthcare, such that people with expensive, life-threatening conditions (leukemia, needing a heart-transplant, etc.) can get it without worrying about its affordability, while more-routine checkups are paid for by individuals and/or their healthcare plans.

This would lower the cost of healthcare for individuals, because the healthcare company would no longer have to worry about extreme expenses, while it would prevent the "tragedy of the commons" problem I explained above by removing the "third-party" aspect of payment from the individual. As it stands now, we rely on other people to spend money on us. That money would be more wisely-spent if we spent it ourselves.

Millions are so overextended in debt that they're only a couple of paychecks away from the street, even as home foreclosures have hit a 30-year high.

Whose fault is it that those individuals got into debt?

Did Joe Sixpack have his credit cards stolen by Stealing Sixpack and have huge bills run up in his name? Or did Joe use those cards and run up his own bills?

Did Joe Sixpack take out loans for which he failed to determine whether he could repay (with interest)?

Being in debt is almost never somebody else's fault. Barring unusual, not-normally-planned-for circumstances (extreme medical bills, acts of God (which tend to be covered by insurance), etc.) or the illegal actions of another person (fraud, theft, etc.), blame can almost always be placed on the spender, despite his/her attempts to plac

Okay, I made the call and did the search. Here is what I found:

From a Google search using the terms "balkan oil pipeline cheney" ....

1. The following quote, verbatim, from a story at The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) site:

   Despite President George W. Bush's rhetoric about withdrawing our forces from the Balkans, we can expect a strong continuing U.S. presence there.

   Why? It's all about the transportation of massive oil resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.

   Although NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will transport Caspian Sea oil through Macedonia and Albania. The pipeline is slated to carry 750,000 barrels a day, worth about $600 million a month at current prices.

2. An article entitled CHENEY AND BUSH WHEREVER YOU LOOK: THE OIL WARS IN THE BALKANS [caps not mine -0x0000] from David Icke's site [this was the first hit in the list, justifying, I think, my use of the word "trivial" to describe the relative difficulty of finding this information -0x0000].
3. The following quote concerning the potential existence of said pipeline:

   "... a Corridor 8 pipeline project through the Balkans. I have been intimately involved with this project since its inception. Let me state that contrary to the article, it is a crude oil pipeline."

   ... This from someone identifying themselves as "Gligor Tashkovich, Executive Vice President, AMBO Trans-Balkan Oil Pipeline Project". I leave it to the reader to call this guy and get him to confirm or deny. That's beyond my scope.

   The URL for the posting is http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200110/msg00390.html (this one was #5 on the first page of google hits).

And with those tidbits I think I will rest my case to the effect that

1. The idea of a Bosnia/Oil connection is not an idea that I personally came up with
2. The idea is not totally new or unknown to persons who look beyond the CNN/FoxNews one-liners.
3. A fairly trivial google search on the topic will turn up quite a bit more information than I could possibly supply myself.

I encourage you to form an opinion based on the articles and to argue your position with the authors of those articles; they are certainly better equipped to defend or "prove" their various stances than I.

I personally feel that the more I look into this, the more compelling the evidence becomes, however, I again encourage you to do your own research and make up your own mind.

Lastly, I commend to you the following sources...

1. The book written by Zbigniew Brzezinski circa 1997, which book I can't remember the title of
2. The Google search " trilateral commission "
3. The Google search " Zbigniew Brzezinski "

... and leave you with a quote from my source concerning this whole matter:

"that's kid stuff"

Okay, I made the call and did the search. Here is what I found:

From a Google search using the terms "balkan oil pipeline cheney" ....

1. The following quote, verbatim, from a story at The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) site:

   Despite President George W. Bush's rhetoric about withdrawing our forces from the Balkans, we can expect a strong continuing U.S. presence there.

   Why? It's all about the transportation of massive oil resources from the Caspian Sea through the Balkans, and maintaining U.S. hegemony in the region.

   Although NATO ostensibly bombed Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, the bombing was actually part of a strategy of containment, to keep the region safe for the Trans-Balkan oil pipeline that will transport Caspian Sea oil through Macedonia and Albania. The pipeline is slated to carry 750,000 barrels a day, worth about $600 million a month at current prices.

2. An article entitled CHENEY AND BUSH WHEREVER YOU LOOK: THE OIL WARS IN THE BALKANS [caps not mine -0x0000] from David Icke's site [this was the first hit in the list, justifying, I think, my use of the word "trivial" to describe the relative difficulty of finding this information -0x0000].
3. The following quote concerning the potential existence of said pipeline:

   "... a Corridor 8 pipeline project through the Balkans. I have been intimately involved with this project since its inception. Let me state that contrary to the article, it is a crude oil pipeline."

   ... This from someone identifying themselves as "Gligor Tashkovich, Executive Vice President, AMBO Trans-Balkan Oil Pipeline Project". I leave it to the reader to call this guy and get him to confirm or deny. That's beyond my scope.

   The URL for the posting is http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200110/msg00390.html (this one was #5 on the first page of google hits).

And with those tidbits I think I will rest my case to the effect that

1. The idea of a Bosnia/Oil connection is not an idea that I personally came up with
2. The idea is not totally new or unknown to persons who look beyond the CNN/FoxNews one-liners.
3. A fairly trivial google search on the topic will turn up quite a bit more information than I could possibly supply myself.

I encourage you to form an opinion based on the articles and to argue your position with the authors of those articles; they are certainly better equipped to defend or "prove" their various stances than I.

I personally feel that the more I look into this, the more compelling the evidence becomes, however, I again encourage you to do your own research and make up your own mind.

Lastly, I commend to you the following sources...

1. The book written by Zbigniew Brzezinski circa 1997, which book I can't remember the title of
2. The Google search " trilateral commission "
3. The Google search " Zbigniew Brzezinski "

... and leave you with a quote from my source concerning this whole matter:

"that's kid stuff"

Statistics disagree.

Unfortunately, while Hubbert was right about a peak, he was wrong in all the ways that matter.

The major problem with these dire predictions is that they can't take into account revolutionary changes in technology/lifestyles. They also don't take into account that known reservoirs may refill from yet-undiscovered sources.

Back in the late 1880 horses were the main form of transportation. If anyone extrapolated the growth of, say, New York City for the next 50 years they would conclude that horse feed and horse crap would be a huge problem by 1930!

Yes, oil is a finite resource. What is often overlooked is that there are billions of barrels in forms/reservoirs that are not economical to extract at current prices and with the current techniques. As the price rises it will become economical to develop these resources and the price will stablilize.

My personal prediction is that we will never run out. At some point renewable energy will become cost competitive with petroleum (getting close even now) and we will stop using it for energy. Thereafter petroleum will probably be used as feedstock for chemicals/lubricants but will eventually be replaced by bio-synthetic products.

Tin-foil hats are fashionable in certain circles - if you haven't already "married the idea" of catastrophic oil depletion check out the facts here.

Unfortunately, while Hubbert was right about a peak, he was wrong in all the ways that matter.

The major problem with these dire predictions is that they can't take into account revolutionary changes in technology/lifestyles. They also don't take into account that known reservoirs may refill from yet-undiscovered sources.

Back in the late 1880 horses were the main form of transportation. If anyone extrapolated the growth of, say, New York City for the next 50 years they would conclude that horse feed and horse crap would be a huge problem by 1930!

Yes, oil is a finite resource. What is often overlooked is that there are billions of barrels in forms/reservoirs that are not economical to extract at current prices and with the current techniques. As the price rises it will become economical to develop these resources and the price will stablilize.

My personal prediction is that we will never run out. At some point renewable energy will become cost competitive with petroleum (getting close even now) and we will stop using it for energy. Thereafter petroleum will probably be used as feedstock for chemicals/lubricants but will eventually be replaced by bio-synthetic products.

Tin-foil hats are fashionable in certain circles - if you haven't already "married the idea" of catastrophic oil depletion check out the facts here.

It's not like it's cleaner than coal in collection, energy production, or cleanup.

Take a Geiger Counter outside of a nuclear plant. Now take one outside of a coal plant. Hmmm... Much higher readings outside of the coal plant. What? Coal ore contains radioactive isotopes? Those isotopes don't burn up like the coal around them? Coal ash has concentrated radioactive material? The coal industry isn't as highly regulated as the nuclear industry?

Health problems? Do a google search for black lung disease. Hell, do some research on the total number of deaths from nuclear power generation and coal/natural gas since nuclear power was introduced. Nuclear engineers will normally receive more radiation from a single round of CAT scans than from their entire career at the nuclear plant.

Chernobyl? You mean the substandard plant where operators intentionally ignored warnings and pushed the envelope of safety much too far? The final death count was less than four hundred. Yes, the town of 75,000 had to be abandoned. This is an argument for not intentionally doing stupid things with your power plant.

The worst U.S. nuclear disaster? 3-Mile Island? Go back and check your history books. Look up the number of deaths. Zero. Look up the number of injured. None.

As it stands, U.S. nuclear power technology has fallen behind. Take a look at some of the French or, even better, German designs. I find it hard to believe that anything even approaches their level of safety or efficiency.

Terrorist attacks? Personally I'd be more worried about an exposed warehouse of natural gas where someone dropped a match. How about an oil refinery? Yeah, that'll be easy to clean up...

Nuclear waste? How about the euphemism (according to rabid environmental groups) "spent fuel"? Know why they call it a euphemism? Because all spent fuel in the U.S. is waste. Know why? Because in a bid to stop nuclear proliferation in the seventies, Jimmy Carter banned nuclear enrichment in power generation. No breeders for the U.S. Unfortunately for Carter, Europe gave him the finger and continued using nuclear -- including breeded reactors. Who listened? Japan. However Japan just sends its spent fuel to Europe for re-enrichment and buys it back for further processing.

What's the big deal. Let's take Diablo Canyon on the California coast. Only two turbines. 1/5 of the power production in the region. 20%!!! If anyone is curious, take a look at the number of >0.1MW powerplants in California. Diablo Canyon is on the coast about 2/3 of the way down from the top of the state. Look at all of those dams. Imagine all of the trucks, materials, and associated air/water pollution necessary for bringing the fuel to the plant.

Folks in California wouldn't even sell Diablo Canyon the water they needed even though the water/steam used to turn the turbines doesn't ever come into contact with the reactor; It isn't radioactive. So in addition to providing power, they had to set up a reverse osmosis water desalinization plant to get the water from the ocean. And it still gives 20% of the power for the region.

For all of the people whining about the number of birds killed by power poles and cell phone towers, I encourage you to take a look at the number of birds killed by power-generating windmills.

Solar? Anyone want to do the math on the number of panels necessary for even half of the national electricity usage? What about the power and materials required for their inital production?

Tidal? Will someone explain to me how land-locked regions would be able to take advantage of tidal power?

Fuel from soybeans? That would be a nice supplementary energy source. However, let's stop making food. Let's dedicate the nation's farmland to soybeans or other similar fuel generation crops. Reduce that number by the fuel necessary to s

The rich wanted the barriers down in europe so they could get cheap supplies and were double sided by wanting to prevent cheap imports. America was classic for doing this.
You're oversimplifying the issue. From mabout 1700 onwards, there was a strong overall trend in Europe of breaking down trade barriers in both directions.

For example the Dutch paid more for products like sugar and the british paid less. So Americans would buy sugar cane from the spanish Indies because the price was the lowest and then resold 9 out of 10 barrels of processed sugar or Mollasis to the Dutch.
I don't see how this has anything to do with trade barriers. Maybe try explaining it more clearly?

This is why America's standard of living was higher.
That's a vast oversimplification of the issue. In general, Americas standard of living has always been very high. The main thing is that we have tons of resources, and not a lot of people to support.

Demand for labor does not go down if an employer really needs the job filled.
Things don't work on a case-by-case basis like that. In general, employers *don't* need the job filled, especially not in the markets where we're talking about minimum wage workers. If hiring X more workers would cost them too much money, they'll simply produce less, thus lowering the demand for workers.

If the poor have more money they buy more products which trickle back down into the economy.
Studies show that the minimum wage actually increases poverty.

Yes some businesses can not hire as fast but if people do not have money to buy your products they wont want to hire anyway. Right? Owners can just raise prices instead.
If owners raise prices, then people will have less money to spend on other goods.

The problem you seem to be having is that you don't seem to understand that the labor market, as well as the products market, is a self-balancing equilibrium. It'll reach an equillibrium no matter what you do to it. The problem is that some things you do to it, like restrictions in free trade, as well as minimum wage laws, create inefficiencies in the system that sap potential productivity.

The free siders theory of the rich is ignorant since most store their money in reserves and banks and do not buy more products.
Where the hell do you think that money goes? Nobody keeps their money under the mattress. If they don't spend it, they invest it. That money thus goes back into the economy, to finance new business ventures, housing purchases, capital investment, etc.

Productivity is garbage. They are not more productive working for cheaper. It only means you get more work per less buck. Efficiency is a more accurate term.
I never said foreign workers were more productive. I said that under a minimum wage, overall productivity drops, because labor black markets redirect resources from productive uses (working), to unproductive uses (dodging the law).

Clinton raised taxes on businesses and the wealthy but they earned more money from the booming economy.
Raising taxes on businesses is generally considered harmful. Businesses don't sit on their money, they invest it. Taxing them discourages investment in the future. While I'm generally in favor of higher taxes on the wealthy, I do acknowledge they cost the economy. However, unlike free trade restrictions and minimum wage laws, which harm everyone in the long term, taxes serve to redistribute wealth, which economists generally agree is an acceptable trade-off.

Tarrifs work.
They do not. The vast majority of economists say they do not. History shows that they do not.

We have hundreds of years of history to back that up.
No we don't. We are party to many of the largest free-trade agreements in the world, ones that have been beneficial to everyone involved. Examples, please?

All of europe had tarrifs

a) I think it's a bad idea. Smells of big brother to me. Next, there'll be blood tests to start your car.
b) That said, i don't see why dealerships and drivers should be paying. I'm sure insurance companies and governments could find an effective way to pay this off. Here, check out how much drunk driving costs. (ncpa.org)

I'll refer to the research of the Economic Policy Institute about the minimum wage.

I'll see your policy wonk think tank and raise you 1, 2, 3 4 5. I'm sure you could do the same. Once you get beyond the simple laws of economics (like supply and demand) to more complex theories I challenge you to find any two economists that really agree with each other. "If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." - Winston Churchill

Don't overuse the simple model of supply and demand, especially when issues like pricing, competition, floors, and perception are involved. The most useful models are far, far more complex.

The reality of course is far more complex than a simple graph of supply and demand. Unfortunately I don't see any evidence that any of the multitude of competing, contradicting complex models put out by a wide array of economists are any better. As I said economics is NOT really a science, they try and I think there is a good body of fundamental, basic insights into the basic behavior of economies. But as economic models become more complex the more controversial they are, there is no consensus aside from intellectual fads that wax and wane over time. Polls of economists over the years seem to indicate a great deal of agreement on the basics (like the law of supply and demand AND it's application to the minimum wage and price controls generally) while there is no agreement on the complex theories that purport to trump those basic rules. ("when done 'right', under certain conditions, at this time but not this other time, please forget that my last economic forecast was utterly wrong - I can explain that" etc. etc. etc.)

In any event even the complex models that attempt to show price controls on labor as being an exception to the basic rules of supply and demand that the vast majority of economists would agree apply to every other commodity are valid only at the margins. Perhaps a slight increase in the minimum wage would have no ill effects but I think even the most liberal economist would agree that an outrageous increase (say to $100 per hour just for an extreme example) would have a bad effect on employment. Where then is the cut-off, or the tipping point where the advantages for the poor outweigh the disadvantages? Is there even such a tipping point or does the ill effect just get smaller until it is masked by the various other effects that are also operating on the unemployment rate (or just easier to explain away as being due to other factors). If President Clinton raised the minimum wage marginally during a time of economic expansion and nearly "full employment" would we even notice the ill effects (unemployment was low, but would it have been lower still)? Would raising minimum wages during the early stages of a jobless recovery see the same absence (or masking) of ill effects? Would raising the minimum wage from $5.15/hr to a "living wage" often asserted to be $14/hr - well over double the current rate - have the same non-existent or negligible ill effects?

I think the basic laws of economics are fundamentally sound and underlie the immense complexity often masks them and provide numerous APPARENT counter-examples. I have no such confidence in various complex theories that attempt to show that these counter-examples are themselves the rule rather than the exception and that we can now ignore the old fundamental rules.

Yeah, invade China. I won't take issue with your larger comment as I consider it to be flamebait.

But I want you to know that the U.S. runs an annual trade deficit with the Chinese of nigh, 100 billion US every year now. Seems to me that the Chinese are the ones who would have a problem selling the U.S. the fruits of their cheapo labor market. Read all about it here.

First of all, I wasn't referring to deficits - only the revenue side of the equation. Analysis from here and here would indicate that the US is not taxed so highly that we're on the far side of the Laffer Curve, i.e. that reducing taxes would lead to increased revenues. It makes for a nice story, but it just simply isn't true.